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Several members of Philadelphia City Council plan to reject a city waste disposal contract with Reworld, a company that burns trash in the city of Chester and several other places in Pennsylvania.
The contract is among three that Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration has proposed awarding to companies to dispose of the city’s curbside trash over the next four to seven years. The other contracts would go to Republic and WM.
Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, sponsor of a bill that would ban the city from signing new waste incineration contracts, said sending Philadelphia’s trash to be burned in Chester amounts to environmental racism.
“Mayor Parker is asking City Council to renew our contract with a trash incinerator that turns our waste into toxic air that fuels asthma and toxic ash that causes cancer,” Gauthier said during a press conference Thursday. “Not on our watch.”
The city’s current waste disposal contracts, with WM and Reworld, expire at the end of the year. The city extended these contracts for six months past their original expiration in late June.
City Sanitation Commissioner Crystal Jacobs Shipman said in July that the city considered cost, disposal capacity, operational capability and environmental impact when evaluating companies’ bids. Elizabeth Lankenau, director of the city’s Office of Sustainability, said at the time that her team found no “clear consensus” that incineration is worse overall for health and the environment than landfilling, or vice versa.
Shipman said Wednesday the city estimates that the proposed contracts with WM, Republic and Reworld will save taxpayers roughly $7 million in savings for trash disposal and roughly $2 million in savings for recycling in the first year.
“We are looking at significant savings,” she said.