Tourists not Trash – not so simple after all

Opinion by William Ouweleen –

A start-up Rochester-based company is proposing to build a huge trash incinerator in the heart of Finger Lakes Wine Country.

Circular enerG promotes itself as a brand-new company with no prior experience in garbage burning, but offers every assurance they have it all figured out.

The public has yet to lay eyes on the actual plans for the plant. To date, all the company has offered is a computer-generated illustration of a plant built somewhere in China.

Past news coverage of the project indicated it would be financed with EB-5 investors. Otherwise known as “Green cards for sale” the EB-5 program allows foreign nationals to invest $500,000 in ‘job-creation’ projects and fast-track citizenship, jumping the line of other immigrants who are following the arduous process of legal immigration to the USA. Records reflect most EB-5 visas are being granted to Chinese investors and their families.

So if I have this right: Chinese investors will buy their citizenship by investing in a garbage burning plant (perhaps the biggest in America), which will bring hundreds of trash trucks and untold trash trains to the Finger Lakes every day, and a company who has no experience in this industry nor has ever engineered, built, or operated a garbage incinerator plant is assuring local folks that they have nothing to fear.

The lawyer for Circular enerG, Alan Knauf, has offered assurances that this trash incinerator is far-superior to garbage burners of the past but the people of the Finger Lakes aren’t buying Mr. Knauf’s characterizations.

After attempts to get approval from the Romulus Planning Board failed, Knauf withdrew the application from the local folks and is now attempting to get the State PSC to permit the project as a “renewable energy plant.”

Billed as a new-fangled “Waste-to-energy” plant, in point-of-fact this trash incineration project is just one more knife in the back of the growing Finger Lakes Agritourism Industry.

Already the Finger Lake Region suffers under the presence of two of the largest landfills in New York State. The proposed garbage burner would further advance the notion that the Finger Lakes Region is trash-central for everyone else’s garbage.

The Finger Lakes Wine Business Coalition (FLXWBC), a member organization of vineyards, wineries, restaurants, B&B’s, entrepreneurs and family businesses has opposed the project and is petitioning the PSC and Governor Cuomo to disallow its construction.

The primary objection of the FLXWBC is that a huge trash incinerator is the wrong kind of economic development for the Finger Lakes. It requires more energy than it produces and it profits Circular enerG and foreign investors at the expense of local people and the Finger Lakes Way of Life. Burning garbage is dirty business. Waste and wine don’t mix.

No one should be allowed to build the Nation’s biggest garbage-burner in the heart of Finger Lakes Wine Country. The project calls for a 260 foot smokestack, which will release pollution in all directions as the wind blows, and the Romulus K-12 school is a mere 3200 feet downwind from the smokestack. The trash-burning plant will be located between the two largest Finger Lakes, Seneca and Cayuga, and smokestack emissions and toxic ash will be the end product of burning hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage each year. Forever.

Fat-soluble toxins emitted from the smokestack can blow onto dairy fields, farms, vineyards and into the streams and lakes, accumulating in the fat cells of cows, fish, deer, goats and sheep.

The company will tell you that smokestack emissions will be well-below allowable Federal limits. Even if this were true, the cleaner the smokestack emissions the more toxic the ash produced. That ash will end up in Finger Lakes landfills, adding tons and tons of toxic ash with high levels of concentrated hazardous materials.

It is really a simple argument to follow: You cannot be the garbage dump and trash burning hub of New York State AND be the world’s most exciting wine and agritourism destination. It is one OR the other, and the ‘other’ is already a proven economic engine for Upstate New York, attracting millions of tourists, producing billions of dollars of economic impact and tens of thousands of jobs that have stretched back 6 and 7 generations.

It has taken the Finger Lakes 50+ years to build a world-class reputation for fine wine, food, fishing and outdoor recreation. No one in their right mind would encourage or permit that reputation to be trashed with an unending parade of NYC garbage trucks and trains operating day in and day out, with emissions from a 260 foot smokestack landing on lakes, farms, vineyards and schools in every direction as the wind blows.

Millions are being invested in Upstate NY to make it a vibrant, self-sufficient prosperous region. Industrial Trash Incineration is not part of our regional vision. Our cry to Governor Cuomo and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio must be: “Send us your tourists and stop trashing the Finger Lakes!”

Governor Cuomo’s plan to power NYS with zero emissions renewable energy sources does not include burning garbage to make energy. ‘Waste-to-energy” should be more accurately titled “Waste-of-energy.” It takes more energy to burn trash than it produces. The more trash we burn the less we recycle, and the less we recycle the more we lose valuable materials that can be repurposed and reused in manufacturing – materials that took a lot of energy to manufacture the first time. Burning those materials to generate a small amount of electricity is a cover for what is otherwise a dirty business.

You may ask: “If this project is designed to burn NYC garbage, why not build it closer to the garbage source?”

The answer is: they cannot. NYC air quality is already compromised and precludes any further pollution from projects like burning garbage.

The solution, according to Circular enerG is to find a REALLY clean patch of air that can handle a little pollution and toxic emissions and they see the Finger Lakes to be that perfect place.

The Finger Lakes is NOT the perfect place to burn New York City’s garbage.

Tourists. Not Trash.

Simple, but apparently not easy as the fight to protect the Finger Lakes rages on.

For more information and to join the local campaign to protect the Finger Lakes, visit SenecaLakeGuardian.org and FLXWBC.com

William Ouweleen is the Secretary of the Finger Lakes Wine Business Coalition and a Vintner at O-Neh-Da & Eagle Crest Vineyards in Conesus, NY.