For more than a decade, Maryland Sen. Karen Lewis Young tried to get the state to pull the plug on public subsidies for trash incineration, a form of energy that’s considered dirtier than coal. None of the bills have crossed the finish line. 

Then came a phone call as she was pulling into her driveway a few weeks ago. On the other end of the line was Bill Ferguson, the Senate president. “He said, ‘This is the year I’m not only going to support the bill, I want to sponsor that bill,’” recalled the Democrat from Frederick County. 

On Oct. 18, Ferguson announced he will sponsor legislation in the upcoming General Assembly session to remove waste incineration from the Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), the state’s incentives program for renewable energy projects. 

“I’ve become increasingly concerned about emissions from the BRESCO incinerator as a public health and environmental justice issue for surrounding neighborhoods,” Ferguson said of the WIN Waste incinerator (formerly known as Wheelabrator and BRESCO), the largest stationary source of industrial air pollution in Baltimore. 

Located off I-95, next to the city’s most disadvantaged communities, the incinerator emits hazardous pollutants including mercury, lead, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter. Those noxious emissions contribute to respiratory issues, heart conditions and other serious health problems, particularly in adjoining neighborhoods.

“As we take steps to incentivize true, clean energy in Maryland, 2025 must be the year that we remove waste incineration from our Renewable Portfolio Standard,” Ferguson declared.

Under Maryland law, electricity providers can buy renewable energy credits (RECs) sold by energy providers—including trash incinerators—and pass the costs of those credits on to consumers in their energy bills. RECs are issued when one megawatt-hour of electricity is generated and delivered to the grid from a renewable energy source. 

Lewis Young said she was happy to see Ferguson go from being on the fence a year ago to fully supporting the efforts to deny millions in public dollars to incineration companies. 

She’d opposed trash incineration before she entered the Maryland General Assembly in 2015. “For me, the No. 1 issue was the negative environmental effects of burning trash,” she said. “We were spending, on average, $17 million a year to incentivize dirty energy. That money could be better spent elsewhere, not only financial resources but job growth in clean energy industries.” 

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She said her research led her to believe that more than 80 percent of dirty energy sources like incinerators were located in communities where 25 percent or more of the population identified as either minority or lived below the federal poverty line. “Because of those reasons, I got increasingly enthusiastic and determined to get trash incineration removed as clean energy,” she said.

In the 2024 legislative session, Lewis Young sponsored the Reclaim Renewable Energy Act, which proposed excluding energy derived from burning waste from the RPS. The bill failed to advance out of committee in either chamber. 

It was the seventh consecutive year a bill seeking an end to a public subsidy for trash incineration failed to pass. In 2023, a similar bill proposing the removal of trash incineration, factory farm gas and woody biomass from the RPS met the same fate. Because the 2024 bill focused solely on ending credits for trash incineration, advocates were hopeful about its passage. But Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, refused to get behind the bill, attracting the ire of environmentalists. 

It’s anyone’s guess if the Moore administration will act differently in the 2025 legislative session. Carter Elliott, a press secretary for the governor, provided a written comment that did not answer the question: “The governor looks forward to working with the state legislature, local leaders, and advocates on behalf of all Marylanders this upcoming session. The Moore administration is working with all partners involved to ensure that we are continuing to put forward legislation that will make Maryland safer.” 

Incinerators have been eligible for public subsidies through the state’s clean energy credit system since then-Gov. Martin O’Malley signed legislation in 2011 declaring the electricity generated from burning trash a “tier one” renewable energy, on par with wind and solar. 

Also called “waste-to-energy” facilities, trash incinerators like those operated by WIN Waste convert non-hazardous, non-recyclable materials into usable energy through combustion. They also release hundreds of thousands of tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide every year in addition to PM2.5—extremely small particles that get into blood and lungs. 

With Ferguson’s support, Lewis Young is hopeful the General Assembly will finally remove trash incineration as “tier one” renewable energy. 

Del. Lorig Charkoudian, a Democrat from Montgomery County, said she was thrilled to hear of the Senate president’s commitment. “It’s a very good sign, and I look forward to working with all of my colleagues to make it a reality. Nothing’s a done deal until the entire General Assembly votes to make it happen. And while I join in the optimism, we’re going to continue to work to make sure that it happens.”

Charkoudian stressed that the 2024 legislation was about ending the public subsidy for incineration and is unrelated to the question about waste management. Incineration companies wrongly asserted at the time that removal of the subsidy will lead to waste management problems, she said. 

She said that incineration does not belong in the RPS and public dollars should be used to increase the amount of real clean energy on the grid: solar, onshore and offshore wind and hydro. 

She said that taking away this subsidy will not make a difference in whether these plants continue to operate. “If you look at their profits and revenue statements, there’s zero evidence to suggest that taking this subsidy away would result in the closure of the plants.” 

Charkoudian is also working on a separate “Clean Resource Adequacy Bill” to be introduced in the upcoming session that aims to restructure the RPS, bringing in as much new clean energy generation to the grid as possible while rapidly adding energy storage. 

Mary Urban, communications director for WIN Waste Innovations, said the company has recently invested nearly $50 million to upgrade the facility. “Similar legislation has been introduced over the past several years, but each proposal undermined the Renewable Portfolio Standard program’s goal to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels,” she said in emailed comments. 

Urban added that Maryland generates minimal energy from wind and solar and relies predominantly on energy from nuclear, natural gas and coal. “Excluding waste-to-energy (WTE) from the RPS requires Marylanders to subsidize out-of-state businesses while ignoring the work WIN does to divert waste from landfills and reduce greenhouse gases while avoiding fossil fuels,” she added.

Between 2012 and 2030, Maryland is set to pay more than $300 million to trash incinerators, according to a March analysis by the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Clean Water Action and Progressive Maryland. It showed that the participating trash incinerators emitted more CO2 per megawatt-hour than any other energy sources included in the RPS. Among the facilities operating in Maryland, the WIN Waste incinerator in Baltimore City emitted the highest amount of CO2, estimated at 690,033 tons per year. 

In 2022, the most money went to Covanta, which owns and operates a trash incinerator in Lorton, Virginia, and pocketed $11.7 million, the data showed. WIN Waste Innovations, which owns and operates the incinerator in Baltimore, received about $4.2 million through the sale of RECs.

In the past 10 years, the report said, the price of RECs sold by trash incinerators increased more than sevenfold. They are now more expensive than RECs affiliated with wind, a clean, renewable energy source. 

Ferguson’s announcement has energized community groups and environmental organizations who have long voiced their opposition to burning trash for energy at public expense.

Jennifer Kunze, Maryland director for Clean Water Action, called Ferguson’s statement a “game changer” and the result of his constituents making sure this issue remains a priority. She said the communities impacted by trash incineration have been “really loud and consistent for years” in highlighting it as a major climate and environmental justice problem that needs to be addressed.

She said that there’s still a lot of work that needs to happen between now and the end of the legislative session in April, particularly for making sure that the bill moves forward in both House and Senate committees. “We are really looking for the House now to make it known early that this bill is going to be an environmental justice priority,” Kunze said, adding that a lot depends on House Speaker Adrienne Jones and C. T. Wilson, chair of the House Economic Matters Committee. 

“We’re really looking to Gov. Moore, the Maryland Department of the Environment and the Maryland Energy Administration to issue a similar public statement that trash incineration needs to come out of the RPS and won’t be part of the state’s clean energy plan,” Kunze said.

Separately, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is investigating a federal civil rights complaint alleging that Baltimore City’s 10-year solid waste plan failed to commit necessary resources to end the city’s reliance on the WIN Waste incinerator.

The South Baltimore Community Land Trust, the community group that filed the complaint along with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Environmental Integrity Project, called Ferguson’s announcement “a critical step forward for environmental justice.” In a statement, the group said: “South Baltimore residents have long suffered the health and development impacts of the BRESCO incinerator—the largest single source of air pollution in Baltimore and the source of toxic ash filling the city’s landfill also located in the neighborhood.” 

Kim Coble, executive director of the Maryland League of Conservation Voters, said the lack of progress on trash incineration during the last legislative session was listed in her group’s 2024 environmental scorecard as an impediment to the state’s transition to clean energy. 

Coble said the inability to remove polluting energy sources from the RPS was one of the many bills with environmental justice implications that the 2024 General Assembly session failed to make progress on. 

“Unfortunately, none of the bills passed that were directly related to environmental justice. So that’s a problem. The same with climate and energy,” she said. “And none of the three bills related to generating revenue [for climate action] got out of the committee.” 

Lewis Young said issues of energy and climate action will take center stage during the upcoming General Assembly session. She expects bills calling for making polluters pay—that type of proposal “met some pushback” from the administration last year, she said, alluding to the Responding to Emergency Needs from Extreme Weather (RENEW) Act. The bill, which failed to pass, aimed to make oil and gas companies pay for their pollution. 

Other bills calling for new penalties and incentives will also likely drop next year to generate momentum for meeting the state’s climate and emissions reduction goals, she said.