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BY SARAH PETERSON

In print | February 7, 2008

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “the average American will throw away 600 times his or her adult weight in garbage” over the course of a lifetime. Given the average lifespan of an American, that’s about 30 times your body weight just over the course of four years in college.

Where does all this trash go? What happens to it? The story of your trash and recycling doesn’t end at the trash can, of course; that’s just where this story starts.

According to Associate Vice President of Facilities Stu Hain, most offices on campus are outfitted by the college with two waste bins - one for paper, and one for trash. For other various recyclable materials - aluminum, glass, plastic — there are also bins in most hallways.

In dorms, the situation is similar — beyond whatever depositories students have in their rooms, each hall has two trash cans and a paper waste bin, as well as a recycling bin.

Grounds and Environmental Services oversee the regular removal of waste and recycling from the buildings and transportation to the dumpsters located behind buildings all across the campus. Each dumpster is not necessarily emptied every day, so a single dumpster may contain layers holding multiple days of trash before they are removed after 7 a.m. on pickup days.

The dumpsters, however, are not college-owned. They belong to the college’s rubbish removal contractor, Jack Clark & Sons Inc., who have been taking care of the college’s garbage and recycling for 32 years. By the estimates of Jack Clark himself, the company has about 50 dumpsters total on Swarthmore’s campus. They also own the compactor located behind Sharples.

Fifty dumpsters is a lot, especially with the added consideration that Jack Clark & Sons sends their trucks to empty dumpsters on campus six days a week.

However, not all of the dumpsters, and not every set of materials, gets picked up each of the six days, Clark said. While garbage is taken from campus on a daily basis, different recycling materials are picked up according to different days of the week and taken to various recycling sites across the region.

The college started recycling in the mid-1990s with the support of Earthlust, according to a “Greening of Swarthmore” report produced by students in the Spring 2007 Environmental Studies Capstone Seminar. According to Director of Grounds Jeff Jabco, the college currently recycles 19 different goods, which the report estimates as costing the college a total of ten to twelve thousand dollars a year.

These materials range from antifreeze to the more familiar categories of mixed paper and commingled materials. Noting a recent decline in the amount of common materials being recycled, Jabco provided The Phoenix with recycling figures from 2007 that were not yet published.

In 2005, the college recycled 36.25 tons of commingled materials — meaning glass, plastic, aluminum, and bimetallic. In 2006, this amount decreased to 34.75 tons. And last year, the college only recycled 32.75 tons.

“We’ve gone down two tons every year,” Jabco said.

In paper, the figures follow a similar pattern. In 2005, 67.02 tons of paper were recycled. In 2006, that number went down to 63.04 tons, and decreased again in 2007 with 61 tons recycled.

It’s doesn’t seem likely that these figures are the result of less consumption in the community, but rather that they indicate less and less consistent recycling habits. “Some students are more conscientious of recycling in the dorms than in other places,” Hain said.

While the college is able to have its recycled goods weighed, it is so far impossible to know the figures for how much garbage is carted away on a yearly basis. “The problem is, when he picks up ours, he picks up others’ too,” Jabco said, referring to Clark’s company. After picking up trash on Swarthmore’s campus, the Springfield-based contractor’s trucks go to other client sites before getting weighed. Consequently, it’s impossible to know how much Swarthmore is contributing to the load.

Jabco said that it would be possible to get these figures - and perhaps necessary at some point - but to do so would involve rerouting the trucks out of their way, and burning excess fuel in the process. “How sustainable do you want to be?” he said, explaining the tradeoff.

The contractor’s trucks eventually take Swarthmore’s trash into nearby Chester, to the incinerator owned by Covanta Energy. Formerly known as the Westinghouse Incinerator, the trash-to-steam incinerator is the largest of six incinerators across the state of Pennsylvania and the 7th largest in the entire country. It burns 2,688 tons of unsorted trash each day, according to Mike Ewall, founder and director of Action PA and Environmental Justice Network.

Ewall has also worked with student activists, including Earthlust.

“There’s a tonnage of trash that has to go through for [Covanta] not to lose money — a few years ago the Chester mayor went to Philadelphia and asked them to give them their trash,” Yaeir Heber ‘11 said. Heber is a member of Earthlust, involved in the group’s environmental justice initiative and also a part of the DelCo Alliance for Environmental Justice. The alliance is a recently-formed group.

To stay in operation, the incinerator takes waste not only from Delaware County and surrounding areas, but also from Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey. The incinerator is not the only waste treatment facility in Chester - other facilities, some now closed, handle wastewater and medical waste - but even alone its impact would still be felt.

Before the waste even reaches the incinerator, Ewall said, nearby residents are plagued with “trucks going down residential streets — odors, noise, diesel emissions … [this] impacts health pretty directly.”

Other emissions, Ewall explained, include dioxin, mercury, arsenic and lead. Having these pollutants in the air “affects people’s health and their ability to think, to learn.” They can also cause miscarriages and birth defects.

“The health effects are really noticeable,” Heber said, citing figures that indicated that the waste treatment facilities were the cause of increased risks of asthma and cancer for residents.

“The dioxin emissions [released by the incinerator] are ten times higher than the rest of industries in the county that report to the Toxic Release Inventory run by the EPA,” Ewall said.

The incinerator, however, is exempt from reporting.

Meanwhile, in the eyes of the DelCo Alliance, the community of Chester reaps no benefits from the arrangement. According to Heber, the waste treatment industry doesn’t provide much in the way of employment opportunities, although that is how it had been advertised initially. “The revenue isn’t going to Chester,” Heber said. “It’s going to investors who are somewhere outside of Pittsburgh.” The Office of the Mayor of Chester did not respond to phone and e-mail requests for comment.

Though attempts to reach a representative from Covanta for comment were unsuccessful, the Covanta Web site claims that the Chester incinerator “provides an effective and environmentally safe solution to the county’s solid waste disposal needs.”

Furthermore, their official description indicates that the work of the plant produces as a byproduct 75 megawatts of electricity, of which 90 percent is sold to the local community, though its efficiency is unclear.

Ewall provided The Phoenix with a resolution that had been adopted at the Delaware County Democratic Party’s convention, after being put forth by the head of the Chester Democratic Party. The resolution supported “waste reduction and a moratorium on additional polluting waste industries in the county,” and included reminders that as a result of pollution Delaware County is in the top 10% of counties nationwide for “for cancer risk from toxic air and water pollution.”

Many have declared the situation to be an instance of environmental racism, as Chester’s population is over 75 percent African-American (according to the 2000 Census) and a disproportionate amount of toxic industry is concentrated in the city.

“Delaware County has done more than its share as a destination for the region’s waste,” the resolution stated. The privately-owned incinerator will remain open on publicly-owned land until the end of its renewable contract in 2017.

Ewall attended a meeting for Delaware County’s Solid Waste Authority earlier in the year, where he learned that the county was “required to supply 303,375 tons [per] year of waste to Covanta.”

If that requirement is not met, county risks penalty. As it stands, the county currently oversupplies waste to Covanta, resulting in different penalties totaling $3 million a year — money “that could be saved if the county would help municipalities pay for better waste reduction, recycling and composting, to reduce having to send so much waste to the incinerator,” Ewall said in an e-mail.

There’s further frustration for all in that reducing waste doesn’t immediately translate into reducing the incinerator’s emissions.

For Swarthmore College to reduce its waste would likely only mean that much more waste would come from somewhere else — within the county, or somewhere in the region.

“This is such an economic powerhouse, and very entrenched,” Ewall said. “has a contract with the county that has the county taking ash off of its hands.”

Still, he added, it’s important to reduce waste as much as possible, to inflict strain on the industry, and reduce environmental impact overall.

Moreover, he said, “If Swarthmore students were to work within their campus, borough and county to help move the county towards a zero-waste goal, the county could reduce its waste generation by 60-90 percent like other communities have — making it far more likely that the county could back away from incineration when the contract comes back up in 2017.”

For those interested in learning more about the history of waste treatment and hazardous pollution in Chester, there will be a screening of a related documentary, “Laid to Waste” at Widener University on Saturday. The event is hosted by the DelCo Alliance for Environmental Justice.

Additional reporting by Jack Keefe.

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