Starve the Incinerator

Help sustain a growing Michigan-based composting industry and divert waste from the incinerator.

HB 4265 and HB 4266 would hurt the composting industry in Michigan and increase pollution from waste. These bills will NOT save collection costs as source separation is still required.

5/15/12 update: These bills are scheduled for a hearing in the Senate Energy & Technology Committee on Tuesday, May 15 at 1:00 p.m. in the Senate Hearing Room of the Boji Building. Demonstrate your opposition to the bills by helping us fill the seats.

You can also: Send a message to the Michigan House of Representatives urging them to oppose HB 4265 and HB 4266 by clicking here.

Thank you for taking action and spreading the word!

Here’s the message that staffer Sandra Yu sent: 

I was born and raised in Michigan, pay taxes in Michigan, vote in Michigan and plan to stay in Michigan. I love my state and want it to be healthy, clean, sparkling, life-giving and smart about its natural resources. Clean air and water, healthy people, beautiful flora, thriving economies – that’s the message we try to send through our Pure Michigan campaigns, but we need to back that up with our actual policies and how we really treat our environment.

In Detroit, we don’t want more waste going to the incinerator. It’s an outmoded, dirty way of dealing with our trash. We want to be reducing, reusing, recycling and composting our waste. These bills would just open the door to dumping valuable commodities to be burned in a facility that is exacerbating asthma in the city with the state’s highest asthma rates and destroy a smart, resourceful industry that helps create that clean, beautiful Pure Michigan our state is spending millions to campaign about.

I am writing to ask you to vote NO on HB 4265 and HB 4266.

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These bills – now before the House of Representatives – would seriously weaken Michigan’s longstanding ban on landfilling yard trimmings and devastate a thriving Michigan-based composting industry. The bills would exempt landfills with gas recovery systems from the ban, under the false perception that this would dramatically increase landfill gas capture rates.

Since the ban took effect in 1995, more than 40 composting businesses have created millions of dollars worth of nutrient-rich compost. Composting yard trimmings sustains four times the number of jobs on a per-ton basis than landfilling. These businesses buy equipment and services from other Michigan companies and pay taxes to their local governments. In turn they sell their compost and mulch to multiple markets in Michigan including retailers, landscapers, farmers, and government entities. Michigan-produced compost enriches backyards, landscapes, farmland, roadsides, community gardens, and more.

Proponents of the bills, the landfill industry, want yard trimmings supposedly to generate and capture landfill gas; they falsely claim that landfills and composting are equally capable of responsibly processing yard trimmings into a beneficial product. The superiority of composting over landfilling is widely recognized, even by national policy. These bills are not about generating renewable energy; only a small increase in energy production is possible. These bills are about increasing landfill revenue and reducing recycling. While we agree that landfills should capture fugitive methane emissions, they do not need additional yard trimmings to do that. This bill is akin to adding lead back into gasoline because we think we can better recover it through the car’s exhaust system.