URGENT! Contact Your Councilmember This Week! Let's pass the FY27 budget with DEP's plan to close the incinerator in 2027.
Right now, we have the best opportunity in ten years to get harmful pollutants and toxins out of our air almost immediately. After years of studying options, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has now put their full weight and support behind a solution for closing our toxic 30 year old trash incinerator.
DEP’s plan will accomplish:
- Closing the largest industrial polluter in our County, that has been contributing to high levels of chronic lower respiratory disease and cancer in Montgomery County for decades;
- Stopping 150,000 tons of toxic ash from being dumped yearly on a minority community in Virginia;
- Waste reduction through collection and composting of residential food waste. Disposal of our unrecyclable trash in several out-of-state landfills that meet strict environmental justice criteria. These landfills capture methane gas and have modern liners;
- This solution will produce half the amount of greenhouse gases that our incinerator currently emits and multiple times less toxic emissions.
The DEP is ready to finalize the contract with a contractor. All systems are in place to complete the transition by January 2027! 🥳 We now need the County Council to approve the budget for this plan in May 2026.
The problem:
After demanding to see details of the DEP plan and subsequently being provided with them by the agency, the Council President is blocking every effort to further inform the Council and move the plan forward. The DEP has thoroughly answered all Council President’s questions.
Despite this thorough analysis and having a concrete solution ready to execute that will serve us all, the Council President and a few other Councilmembers seem determined to delay this process because they have indicated that they don’t have enough information.
YOU CAN HELP:
Please call your Council Member (look up your representative here) and Council President Natali Fani-González at 240-777-7870 or email (using this action alert or directly) and urge them to pass the budget with full funding for the DEP’s new plan to close the incinerator. If the council does not support this budget, we will lose the contractor and need to start over with a more expensive contract. We will also need to spend approximately $17 million yearly on our 30 year old incinerator and still risk toxic pollution and dioxin releases.
Suggested simple script: "Hello, I'm a constituent and I'm calling to urge Council Member / President Fani-González to pass a budget fully funding the DEP’s plan to close the incinerator in 2027. Please don’t kick the can down the road"
or something like, “Please don’t pour good money after bad into this hazardous Incinerator. There is no reason for millions of our tax dollars to go into a facility that harms our families. The DEP has studied this carefully and they have a contractor ready to go. Please don’t waste this opportunity.”
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It is time to act now! The DEP has a solid plan ready to go. Let’s Pass the FY27 budget including the full plans proposed by the DEP to close the incinerator.
Learn more at Zero Waste Montgomery County website www.zwmc.org.
Many thanks for caring,
Zero Waste Montgomery County
Climate Coalition Montgomery County
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