After more than three decades of dumping toxic waste into our air, the Detroit trash incinerator stack is finally gone. Its final implosion gave us one last burst of noxious air. The demolition team and people gathered to watch wore masks, and neighbors had been warned. Once again, a quiet Sunday morning would be filled with invisible dangers from the smokestack.

There are many lessons from this whole tragic experience.  

From the very beginning, environmental activists opposed the incinerator. The idea that burning trash to generate electricity represents the kind of narrow thinking that still dominates much of the decision making in our city. Corporations and policy makers refused to seriously consider the most obvious question created by this idea: what would be in the smoke created by the burning and where would it go? What would it do to the people who breathed it every day?

I vividly remember James Boggs testimony against the incinerator at an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hearing.  Jimmy emphasized the trail of smoke, mostly over neighborhoods, including his, but also over the Detroit Medical Center and the Eastern Market, dropping heavy metals and toxic gases into our most vulnerable places.  Later, the city of Windsor attempted to sue to stop the burning.  Over the years, countless studies indicated that the incineration of gases increased childhood asthma by three-fold.

In that same hearing I met Harold Stokes for the first time. He gave an impassioned speech outlined by the various T-shirts he pulled off, each one pointing to a problem of a system that encouraged the creation of trash as a source of fuel. His last T-shirt was of a small, beautifully rendered bluebird.  He explained that as a boy he had loved these strikingly vivid birds. They have been disappearing, he explained, and unless we acted to stop this kind of pollution his grandchildren would never see such beauty. All that would be left were hollow images on old T Shirts.

The EPA of course gave its blessing to the incinerator.

For decades the incinerator burned more than 800,000 tons of trash every year. The city could not produce enough to generate the electricity, so it actively imported trash from surrounding suburbs. To attract this trash, the various corporations who owned the incinerator gave special deals to suburban districts, while charging Detroit residents between 5-7 times more than nearby suburbs.

Not only did it cost Detroiters more to burn their own trash, but the whole incineration process cost more than alternative means of trash disposal. One study documented that if Detroit used landfills in the early 2000s, it would have cost about $19 million for one year. Instead, the incinerator cost $75 million to burn the same amount of garbage. In short, in the years leading up to the so-called bankruptcy of Detroit, year after year, we continued to pay exorbitant amounts while poisoning our air.

Further in 1991 the city gave up control of the incinerator selling it to the first of a series of private owners. Yet taxpayers continued to pay bond debt, spending over a billion dollars to support the incinerator construction and operations. In “deals” reflecting the devastating efforts of downtown development, Philip Morris Tobacco purchased the incinerator for $54 million, but they were issued bonds for $157 million to upgrade equipment in the facility and they also received over $200 million in tax credits. For decades, every year $4.1 million in Brownfield Tax credits were compensated to the incinerator’s board of directors.

What should be obvious is that had politicians and government officials believed the arguments of activists, we would be in a much better place today. Our ecosystems would be stronger, our children healthier, our financial situation sounder, our practices of living on the earth more conscious. The arguments for “development” almost always take our genuine desires to develop better ways of living and turn them into ways to advance corporate profit often at the expense of public good. 

Over the next few months, as the Homrich Trucks, “dispose” of the toxic materials left behind, we should all be asking serious questions about the kinds of policies and practices that strengthen our communities. The lessons of the incinerator, like its smoke, linger.