EPA’s new trash incinerator regulations will barely scratch the Baltimore incinerator, because we already won stricter standards. The new regulations won’t kick in until 2028-2029 and do not go far enough. However, when we wrote the Baltimore Clean Air Act that city council unanimously passed in 2019, we put in stricter monitoring and control requirements — strict enough that both the Wheelabrator/BRESCO trash incinerator AND the Curtis Bay Energy medical waste incinerator (largest in the nation) were poised to close down if they had to comply.
A lawsuit by these incinerator companies sadly convinced a judge to throw out the city law and then-Mayor Young and then-city attorney Dana Moore dropped the legal appeal and cut a deal with Wheelabrator that fed them ten more years of trash and, without consulting us, set air standards that were about half as strong as we wanted… but still stronger in most cases than this new EPA rule, which is why this EPA rule won’t do much at all for Baltimore — because we already did it, and about six years sooner.