Before Philadelphia began sending its trash to Chester, prompting the “Stop Trashing Our Air Act,” the city burned its waste in its own neighborhoods and shipped off the ashes far and wide.
By 1941, Philadelphia operated two reduction plants, the Harrowgate Incinerator in Juniata Park and the City Reduction Plant near the Delaware River. The plants would extract grease and nutrients from food waste for fertilizer and burn the rest, according to the 2016 book “From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region.”
Not only was this an expensive process, costing the city $100,000 a year, but unpleasant odors permeated. Yet Philadelphia's dumps weren't ideal, either, due to fires and pests. So the city built and opened several more incinerators in the 1950s: the Bartram Incinerator, the East Central Incinerator, the Southeast Incinerator, the Northeast Incinerator, and the Northwest Incinerator.
By the 1960s, residents in neighborhoods such as Roxborough began to complain about pollutants from nearby facilities. The situation became so dire that the district attorney sued the city, prompting the closure of several incinerators and upgrades to the East Central Incinerator along the Delaware River.
By the 1980s, Philly no longer wanted to deal with its own waste. With just two incinerators in operation, trash and its ashes were piling up in the city. Attempts to find somewhere else to dispose of the waste were met with a resounding “no.” Residents in South Philly killed an attempt to build a trash-to-steam plant in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard in 1985.
By that point, New Jersey’s Gloucester County barred outsiders from using its landfill. Philly had been sending about 40% of its trash there until 1984. So without New Jersey to rely on, 600 tons of trash were then sent to Baltimore daily. Eventually, the Monumental City got sick of us, too, and ended its contract with the city.
In fact, the whole eastern seaboard was tired of it. Facilities in Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina also refused to accept our waste, with officials in South Carolina going as far as sending their own waste back to us.
Philadelphia’s trash problem became an international scandal in 1986 when the Haitian government discovered that the Khian Sea, a cargo ship, dumped 4,000 tons of Philadelphia’s trash ash on its beaches.
With the city losing options for waste disposal and the increasing hazards, Philadelphia closed its remaining incinerators in 1988. Today, the city sends 37% of its waste to incinerators, with most going to a facility in Chester that converts it into energy to power homes. The rest ends up in landfills outside of Philly.
