Waste across Hennepin County is collected and then burned at the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC) in north Minneapolis. How much, you might ask? About 1,000 tons of trash per day for the past 35 years. What’s left? Metric tons of ash, toxic airborne chemicals, and sick citizens.
The HERC is one of the largest point source air polluters in the county, emitting an alarming amount of nitrogen oxides (first in county), mercury (first in county), sulfur dioxide (second in county), carbon dioxide (third in county), and lead (third in county). This air pollution causes adverse health outcomes like respiratory and cardiovascular issues, the cost of which is estimated to be roughly $16 million annually when factoring for hospital admissions, asthma incidences, and lost work days. The lives lost cannot be priced. The HERC is situated next to the northside “green zone” in Minneapolis — a designation given to neighborhoods with high levels of environmental pollution and racial, political, and economic marginalization.
The HERC, along with other facilities such as the Roof Depot site, Smith Foundry, and Bituminous Roadways, all reflect a pattern of a corrupt and inequitable system that places industrial manufacturing and chemical plants in the neighborhoods of low-income BIPOC communities. Shutting down the HERC represents a larger call for environmental justice, a fight that overburdened communities have been leading for decades.
Hennepin County invokes environmental justice as the core of its mission, but has very little to show for it. The Hennepin County Zero Waste Plan and Climate Action Plan prioritize the importance of environmental justice and identify how climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities. The Climate Action Plan states,
“If we do not act boldly, climate change will progressively worsen the disparities in health, housing, and income that communities of color are already experiencing,” and claims “the county looks forward to convening partners to further develop action plans for strategies, pursue collaborations for greater impact, and raise a collective voice for climate policy.” However, the County’s efforts to solicit community input for their HERC closure plan have been sorely lacking.
Just last week, the county put forth a resolution to extend the HERC operator’s contract until 2033, which was slated to expire at the end of 2025. The county approved the extension on Tuesday, offering no real opportunity for public comment. On Oct. 24 of last year, Hennepin County Commissioners passed a resolution directing the county administrator to develop a plan for the closure of the HERC facility between 2028 and 2040. The plan, which was released to the public on Feb. 1, outlines the “highest impact zero waste actions” the county can take — closing the HERC is not among them. The county’s stance is clear: they want to achieve zero waste, then shut down the HERC. And they continue to kick the can down the road, claiming there are “a significant number of legislative changes [that] need to take place before closure.”
The county’s lack of urgency and failure to commit to a closure date has driven the creation of The People’s HERC Transition Plan, which was developed by Zero Waste USA with extensive input from community members and local experts. The People’s Plan demonstrates that “shutting down HERC is doable, and it can be replaced by a better Zero Waste system.” This 98-page plan details how the county can take advantage of federal funds and state programs, while creating over 1,000 new jobs and achieving 75% waste reduction by 2030. Continuing HERC operations, however, will add an estimated $65 million in repair and upgrade costs, and over $460 million in annual operating costs by 2040, to a facility that has already accrued over $37 million in debt since 2012.
Operations and maintenance costs typically increase as plants age and their performance decreases. We should not continue to dump millions of dollars into a facility that is a hazard to public health, and that is five to 10 years past its life expectancy. Incinerator plants are only meant to last 25 to 30 years, and the county’s timeline assumes that the HERC is fit to operate for over half-a-century, if we are to wait until 2040 to shut it down. We should look to cities like Detroit, which shut down its trash burner in 2019. Since then, Michigan’s recycling rate has hit a record high, increasing seven percentage points from 2019 to 2022.
We cannot allow our northside communities to continue breathing in trash for up to 16 more years. The county should take its own advice and act boldly. Shutting down the HERC is necessary to achieve zero waste, and should be the lynchpin on which a viable zero waste plan hinges. Anything less is lip service and empty rhetoric. Burning trash in our backyard is no way to live.
Joshua Anderson studied climate science at the University of Washington, Seattle, and got his master’s degree in energy policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He works as an energy policy analyst and is a resident of Minneapolis.
