At a packed community hearing on Thursday, speaker after speaker decried the ash coming from the city’s trash-burning incinerator, BRESCO, that is routinely trucked through city streets and highways and dumped primarily at the city-run Quarantine Road Landfill.

The amounts are troubling – roughly 30 trucks per day or more than 9,000 truck trips per year, each one with 20 tons of this ash – and so are the possible health hazards for residents, workers and landfill users, community members said.

“I am concerned about how BRESCO ash is being transported and managed. Actually, I’m concerned if BRESCO ash is even safe,” said Lil Hill, outreach coordinator at Fair Havens AME Church in Curtis Bay. “That’s why I have to carry my inhaler everywhere I go.”

Longtime residents, college students, university public health experts and representatives of multiple community and environmental advocacy organizations echoed Hill’s message.

Almost all made the same ask that critics have made for years about the 41-year-old incinerator on Annapolis Road in South Baltimore that is the city’s biggest source of industrial pollution: deny the permit and shut it down.

Yet the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), which held the hearing at the Curtis Bay Rec Center, has already tentatively recommended that the five-year permit be renewed.

Several speakers also had bitter words about another MDE action taken last Thursday: announcing that it had fined and is shutting down a separate, much smaller-scale incinerator operation, Curtis Bay Energy, which has burned medical waste for 32 years.

Even after the facility’s owners pleaded guilty to egregious pollution violations, MDE didn’t act until an intensive citizen monitoring and reporting effort documented continuing black smoke releases.

“It’s being shut down because of people from this community and other communities who have fought for generations to get it shut down, and it should not have to be that way,” Curtis Bay resident David Jones said, his voice cracking as he disclosed his father’s recent death from lung cancer.

Heavy Metals and Dioxin

Pushback at the meeting came from a representative of WIN Waste Innovations (formerly Wheelabrator), the New Hampshire-based company which operates the facility located near I-95 and Horseshoe Casino Baltimore.

“That ash is sampled, analyzed and evaluated to determine whether it exhibits hazardous characteristics,” said David Cribbie, director of air quality management, asserting that results consistently showed the ash to be “non-hazardous and and non-toxic.”

That prompted a sharp response from Greg Sawtell, of the South Baltimore Community Land Trust and the Community of Curtis Bay Association.

He cited a 2014 MDE document cautioning that the “the ash contains materials that are well in excess of the industrial EPA regional screening levels for soils.”

“Multiple heavy metals exceed industrial risk-based standards for soil exposure,” Sawtell said, reading from the document before the crowd of about 200 people.

The ash was found to contain levels of dioxin that were 24 times the EPA level used to assess cancer risk in soils, said the memo written by an MDE toxicologist and obtained by Sawtell’s group from a Maryland Public Information Act (PIA) request.

“If that’s your definition of non-toxic, I’d like you to come back up to the microphone and clarify what you meant”  – Greg Sawtell, South Baltimore Community Land Trust.

“If that’s your definition of non-toxic, I’d like you to come back up to the microphone and clarify what you meant,” Sawtell said, a challenge Cribbie did not take up.

The community, said SBCLT member Carlos Sanchez, “should not have to rely solely on testing done by the company producing the ash to tell us that it’s safe.

“We need independent testing for contaminants like lead, mercury, and dioxins, with the result being made public,” he declared.

MDE: No Violations

Leading off the hearing, MDE regulatory compliance engineer Schuyler Fearins reviewed the systems in place to control pollution measures including mercury and dioxin releases, acid gas, particulates, metals and NOx emissions.

Stack emission tests performed in 2025 and 2026, along with continuous emission monitoring, have shown compliance with all state and federal limits, Fearins said. “No violations or compliance issues were recorded during the five-year period.”

A few witnesses affiliated with area nonprofits said WIN Waste should be applauded for helping fund community recycling programs and clean-up drives.

“They’re actually helping the community more than what a lot of people know,” said Harold Diggs, who leads a southwest Baltimore youth organization.

Overwhelmingly, though, hearing testimony was dominated by speakers expressing grave concerns about the impacts of both the incinerator’s ash and the airborne pollutants released from its 315-foot-tall emissions stack.

“I’m afraid to raise a child in Baltimore City not because of crime, but because of the air,” said Abby Cock, noting that one out of five children in Baltimore are diagnosed with asthma, roughly twice the national rate.

“There are many reasons for this, but we know that a huge one is that we’re breathing in trash. Not just our own trash, but other people’s as well,” Cock said.

KEY BREW STORIES

• EPA will review civil rights complaint against city over Baltimore trash incinerator (7/15/24)

• Baltimore medical waste incinerator still pollutes, burning trash from as far away as Florida (8/9/24)

• A long-sought victory for community groups : Lawmakers end Maryland’s subsidy for incinerators (4/8/25)

• New study strengthens link between CSX coal terminal and air pollution in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay (7/22/25)

• Baltimore County approves 10 more years of BRESCO trash burning. Will Baltimore City do the same? (9/24/26)

• Curtis Bay medical waste company is closing incinerator operations following years of community opposition (9/30/26)

Health Costs to Community

Several speakers mentioned studies by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland, as well as by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, that have found about $55 million in health costs coming from BRESCO.

Dante Swinton, executive director of the nonprofit Our Zero Waste Future, offered a big picture critique, arguing that “WIN Waste Baltimore’s mere existence inhibits Baltimore, Baltimore County and the region from moving justly towards the zero waste economy.”

“At least 75% of the materials we throw out every day are reusable, recyclable or compostable. But Baltimore’s residential recycling rate is under 20%,” Swinton said.

“We’ve never had a robust program to educate on the benefits of reuse, recycling, and composting because of the decades of classist and racist perspectives on what Baltimore is capable of accomplishing.”

“Toxic Melange”

Assertions that the incinerator’s emissions are well below regulatory standards need to be put into perspective, Leah Kelly, senior attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project, said.

“They are referring to outdated EPA standards that were issued in 2006” that the current administration is going to be required to update, Kelly said, calling on Maryland to act independently.

“We ask that MDE exercise its authority to issue stronger standards than the Trump EPA,” she urged.

John Garofalo, a lymphoma survivor who lives in the Anne Arundel County side of Curtis Bay, slammed the state for allowing pollution from multiple facilities – two incinerators, two power plants, the CSX coal terminal and other South Baltimore industries.

“They act as if we don’t matter, and they prioritize polluting industries over our health”  – John Garfalo.

“It all mixes into a toxic melange,” Garofalo said. “We are living with the impacts of the negligence and dereliction of duties of MDE every day.”

“They do not respond to our requests in a timely way. They treat us as if we don’t know what we’re talking about,” he continued. “They act as if we don’t matter, and they prioritize polluting industries over our health.”

Shashawnda Campbell, SBCLT’s environmental justice director, closed out the public testimony by demanding the state help residents obtain information they have sought about the ash.

Without it, she said, “how can we actually know the severity of what is happening to our health?”

Campbell called the state permitting process “not legitimate until we have the answers,” joining the crowd as it began chanting, “Shut It Down.”

PART 2 (coming Tuesday): MDE abruptly cancels a plan to allow independent testing of BRESCO’s incinerator ash.