We don't have to burn trash anymore,
there's other alternatives and ways of dealing with our waste.
We want to starve the incinerator and feed our communities.
The waste incineration industry has really sold their industry as a win-win sustainable solution
but if you're an environmental justice community it is a lose-lose proposition.
Does the average person think about where their trash ends up?
If I'll be honest, I didn't think
about it before starting this work.
I am Melanie Thomas and I work for the South Baltimore Community Land Trust.
Our role is to advance environmental justice and equity
for South Baltimore as well as all of Baltimore.
When we've gone to the different community groups
some of the youth when I asked them I'm like, OK, show them a picture of Bresco,
I'm like, 'do you know what this facility is?', they're like, 'yeah that's the cloud maker'.
I didn't even know what it was when I moved here,
you know, I just thought it was a welcome sign for Baltimore
and that got a rude awakening when I found out what that welcome sign actually was
and how it is harming our environment and our residents.
Most people have never seen a garbage
incinerator if they have they might not know that that's what they're looking at and most of
them reside in environmental justice communities,
marginalised communities which are communities
that face the impacts of multiple cumulative sources of pollution.
So they're contributing
and exacerbating underlying health conditions that already exist in a very vulnerable population.
People should not be more at risk for health diseases because of where they live.
I live in Curtis Bay.
We have a medical waste incinerator, the Bresco incinerator that is
close by, we have an open-air coal pile,
we have various chemical companies ...
It is not an accident that our community is overburdened
by all of these chemical pollutants and industries.
Communities like Baltimore have really had enough,
they're at their limit in terms of the amount of pollution that they're willing to bear.
Incineration is not the answer.
We don't have to rely on old habits and old patterns
and the status quo to help us.
There's so much innovation and that's not saying
that we need a cleaner incinerator.
We don't want incineration period, no discharge to air whatsoever.
What that contract does not do is put a limit on how much trash
we have to send to the Bresco incinerator.
If we're able to limit that, to limit the amount of trash that we're sending,
that the county sends, we would put them out of business.
That's what we want.
How you doing this morning? – Good, how are you?
Good, good, good.
My goal is to educate people about the benefits of
composting because that is the alternative to trash incineration.
My name is Marvin Hayes
and I'm the program manager for the Baltimore Compost Collective.
We are youth led, food scrap
collection service and we serve the amazing Filbert Street Garden which is located in a
full and secure neighbourhood and we provide the soil enhancer black gold compost for residents to
be able to grow their own food.
These are all the ingredients for composting: so you have your oxygen,
your browns which are carbons,
composters, black gold soil enhancer, your nitrogen and once again
trespasses will be composted so stay away from my black gold.
We're able to divert between five and six hundred pounds of waste from going in the
incinerator per week.
You know, I know it's not a lot but it's still to show that these particular
communities care about Baltimore city
and they're willing to make a monetary donation to show the
city that, hey we can compost, we have models,
all we have to do is adopt the best practices from
places like California and Oregon and all those cities out West.
Now even New York is doing curbside compost pickup.
So as they say, if you can do it in New York, you can do it anywhere.
Even though they extended the contract for Bresco for 10 years,
me and all the environmental justice leaders here in Baltimore city,
we're going to starve that incinerator, we're going to starve the incinerator,
we're going to feed the soil
and we're going to feed the community.
We're going to build a bunch of three-bin systems
and put it all around the city so it's accessible to everybody and hopefully Bresco will after
these 10 years either close or provide
a more zero-waste alternative from trash incineration.
If ... were to close today,
it would mean that we would have the opportunity for change.
We would have an environment where we could be proud.
Where we can say we are doing our part to protect
and preserve our environment and our lives
and the future for our children and the generations to come.