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Despite years of pleas from nearby residents to shut it down, Montgomery County plans to continue to use an incinerator in its western area to burn about 550,000 tons of county garbage every year until, likely, 2031, a county official said.

While the Maryland county works to further improve its trash and recycling operations, an agreement with the facility’s operator, Reworld Montgomery, that was set to expire in 2026 will be extended another five years, though the county may opt out sooner, said Jon Monger, director of the county’s Department of Environmental Protection.

County Executive Marc Elrich (D), whose second and final term expires at the end of 2026, had promised to shut down the incinerator in Dickerson before he left office — a nod to the worries from nearby residents over the mercury and other toxic pollutants the facility is authorized to emit every year.

But with the county’s 1 million residents producing about 1.5 million tons of waste every year, keeping the incinerator going for longer is necessary as the county works to develop a more environmentally sound solution, Elrich said in a statement.

“This extension allows us the time needed to evaluate and implement the best available new technologies that will help us transition to a more sustainable future while ensuring that we maintain the safe, efficient operation of our waste management system in the interim,” Elrich’s statement said.

Area residents expressed disappointment over the decision.

“It’s not a healthy thing to have in your community,” said Steven Findlay, who is president of the Sugarloaf Citizens Association and lives about six miles from the incinerator.

Findlay said he and members of his organization understand the county has many factors to consider when deciding how to proceed with trash disposal, but they’ve waited a long time and have been saddled with living close to the pollution for about three decades now.

Findlay said his group gets accused of having a “not in my backyard attitude” about the incinerator. But he and his neighbors “have done our part” hosting industrial facilities and have been working with the county for about a decade to shut this operation down.

“It’s just — it’s time,” Findlay said. “It’s really a disagreement at this point about the timing.”

Monger said the county is still devoted to working toward shutting down the incinerator eventually. But all trash disposal methods are “problematic,” he said.

The county is prioritizing reducing the quantity of trash it produces before it implements an alternative method for disposal, Monger said. It’s focusing first on getting that volume as low as possible with various initiatives before it looks at closing the incinerator, he said, declining to provide an exact figure for that goal.

Monger said his department is trying to get residents to limit how much trash they produce by, among other things, asking them to sort their trash properly and use fewer disposable items. A bill before the county council aimed at eliminating single-use plastic carryout bags at retail establishments could help as well, he said.

The department is also updating its recycling facility with artificial intelligence technology to help sort materials more efficiently and reduce contamination. This could help the county to pull out recyclable products that still have value and sell them in the domestic and global commodities markets, Monger said. His staff is exploring similar approaches to county trash.

“We’re really trying to make sure we are extracting the value out of those materials,” Monger said.

The hope is that the volume of trash will reach a low enough level by 2031 to enable the county to turn to a more environmentally friendly way of dealing with its garbage — likely a landfill option, Monger said.

However, Monger encouraged residents to not view this as an either or situation.

“This is really about what sustainability looks like across the board. It’s not a binary choice,” he said, referring to landfills versus incinerators.

Residents living near the incinerator say they see it differently. Either trash burning machinery is polluting the air where they live or it’s not.

“All these programs that they’re trying to do, we’re fully supportive,” said Lauren Greenberger, a founding member of Zero Waste Montgomery County who lives about five miles away from the facility.

“We want to do them. We’re going to promote it with them, but we want them to start those programs concurrently with closing the incinerator, not sequentially,” said Greenberger, who is also vice president of the Sugarloaf Citizens Association. “Our government has to decide to do this.”

Monger said the county is making progress on many of the trash and recycling metrics it’s working toward and that’s despite the county’s population growing.

Between 2018 and 2022, waste per person decreased by 11 percent, according to a county news release.

Meanwhile, the county’s recycling rate is notably higher than the national figure — 45 percent of county waste is recycled compared to the national rate of 32 percent, Monger said.

Findlay agreed that progress is admirable, but noted that it took years to reach that point. He and his neighbors have been promised this operation would be over soon and that goalpost keeps moving, he said.

“The time has come on this facility,” Findlay said. “It just simply needs to be closed down.”

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University of Wisconsin-Madison, BA in Journalism

Dana Munro is a local reporter covering Montgomery County, Maryland for The Washington Post.

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