It’s Worth the Risk

Voters in San Marcos will have their say on an emotional, four-year-old issue Sept. 15 when they decide whether to allow a trash-to-energy plant to be built in their city.

Proponents of the plant hold it out as a state-of-the-art solution--environmentally safe, energy conserving and economically attractive--to an age-old problem. To the opponents, conversely, it is at best a potential economic disaster and at worst an environmental one.

We share some of concerns of those who oppose the plant. But we believe that appropriate regulatory safeguards have been designed, and if public officials will carry out their enforcement responsibilities aggressively, the plant will not be licensed for construction or operation unless the environmental risks have been shown to be acceptably low. Therefore we recommend a vote in favor of allowing plans for the plant to proceed.

The trash-to-energy plant would reduce our need for landfills by employing a combination of recycling and burning. For every ton of garbage delivered to the plant, only one-fourth of a ton--mainly as ash--would have to be buried.

The most obvious potential problem it poses is for air pollution. But local air quality officials who have scrutinized the San Marcos proposal believe the plant will not have a significant impact on the air. Even the level of dangerous dioxins that will be part of the plant’s discharge will be within safe limits, according to air pollution officials. Significantly, the City of San Marcos and the county Air Pollution Control District will retain authority over the plant’s ongoing operation and will have the power to shut it down if it fails to meet its pollution standards.

The San Marcos plant differs substantially from other garbage incinerators, such as the proposed SANDER plant that recently was withdrawn in San Diego, in that it includes a significant recycling element. As the garbage enters the plant, huge machines will tumble, blow, shred and sort it so that recyclable material such as paper, cardboard, aluminum, metals, glass and film plastics can be segregated and sold to recyclers. That process keeps matter that is the least desirable to burn from entering the incinerator.

The heat from what is burned will produce electricity, which will be sold to San Diego Gas & Electric Co. Along with a percentage of the profit from the recycling, royalties from the sale of energy will help offset the county’s garbage disposal costs.

Financially, the plant will be a boon for San Marcos and looks like a good deal for the county, which will likely face much higher waste disposal costs if it has to open a new landfill in a more remote section. But here, too, it is not without some pitfalls. Plant developers already have renegotiated elements of the contract with the county and now are seeking to get several additional economic concessions.

While we believe the plant offers the best available option for progress in the growing garbage crisis, we do not want to see it become a topic of constant negotiation between the company and the county. We urge the county to stand firm and to be as conservative on the financial questions as it seems to have been on the environmental ones.