Nazir Khan, Doug Gurian-Sherman, and First Ward Council Member Elliott Payne listened to Luke Norquist, second from left. (Mark Peterson)
The movement to close the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center (HERC), the 35-year-old trash burner just north of downtown, is gathering proponents, as witnessed at an April 10 community conversation at Edison High School.
Northeasters and members of neighborhood associations gathered to hear a five-person forum address the status of the facility, its environmental effects on the community and possible alternatives for handling the county’s trash disposal. Approximately 60 persons attended the meeting.
The meeting was co-hosted and promoted by the Bottineau, Audubon, Columbia Park, Holland, Logan Park, Lower Northeast neighborhood associations and the Zero Burn Coalition
Dan Haugen, the president of the Waite Park Community Council, moderated the forum that included Andrea Young, executive director of the Heritage Park Neighborhood Association, Elliott Payne, First Ward City Council member; Doug Gurian-Sherman, former risk assessment scientist with the Environmental Protection Agency; Luke Norquist, an attorney with the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy; and Nazir Khan, executive director of the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table.
HERC is one of seven garbage incinerators in the state, and it burns about 45% of the county’s waste. It was bought by General Electric in 1988 and sold to Hennepin County in 2003. Great River Energy took over management in 2018. The county’s website says HERC produces enough electricity, which is sold to Xcel Energy, to power 25,000 homes. It also provides steam to heat around a hundred downtown buildings.
Opposition to the facility, based largely on concerns about air pollution, goes back to at least 2009, when the county failed to get approval to burn more waste. In response, it pushed the city to collect organic waste for composting. By 2023, the state legislature required the county to close HERC in order to receive funding for an organic waste processing center. Since general waste burning is not considered “green” energy, the county voted to close the facility, sometime between 2028 and 2040.
This did not sit well with environmental activists, who are pressing for a much sooner closure.
Young said she engaged people at the Minneapolis Farmers Market on Lyndale last summer, a few blocks from HERC. She noted that many people are under the impression that the facility is just an energy center.
“This fight has been going on for 35 years, if not more. People don’t know that it’s harming the community when it comes to health impacts. There are a lot of people that have asthma or respiratory issues or cancer, and don’t know why. North Minneapolis, where the HERC is located, is a marginalized community, as well. Black residents of North Minneapolis go to the hospital for asthma at higher rates than others.”
Gurian-Sherman said, “Hennepin County staff have had a narrative that HERC causes negligible air pollution risks, based on gaps in the science and the risk assessment that the county and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency have in the way they look at the risk.
“The county says that HERC is under a stringent permit that MPCA approves, and that would not allow emissions from HERC that could cause any significant harm to the public. That’s simply untrue. The permit from HERC was found in 2008 by a federal court to not uphold a proper assessment of the Clean Air Act by the EPA, and was remanded to the EPA to reconsider those standards.”
Gurian-Sherman said those standards have nothing to do with risk assessment, and noted that the permit is 30 years old. “The standards have changed, the science has changed and the risk assessment has changed.”
He added that the electricity produced is around 40 megawatts, is not considered “clean” or “green” energy and pointed out that the state legislature has required 100% renewable energy production by 2040.
Council Member Payne said the city has made a number of commitments towards zero waste including a Zero Waste Plan. A study of the waste stream coming out of primarily single-family homes found that most of that waste stream could be diverted away from HERC.
“If we were to have the right waste management strategies, we can have two-thirds of that waste not needing burning or landfills,” Payne said. Minneapolis would like to close HERC by 2027.
“I think if there’s only one goal that mattered, it’s picking a firm date to close HERC, because this has been a topic that’s been a game of hot potato between jurisdictions. And the hot potato is you have to get to zero waste before you can close the HERC, or you have to close HERC to get the zero waste.”
Norquist identified three issues that he said factor into the move to use a new method to deal with waste. He said, “The first is electricity. It’s always been the magic idea of waste incineration, that you can turn your trash into energy. There’s even a narrative that if HERC is shut down, thousands of Minneapolis homes will just have their lights turned off. HERC sells the electricity to companies on the grid, and they can send it pretty much wherever they want.”
Khan described a recent trip to the capital of the Indian state of Kerala, which has become an “economic miracle” partly due to its dealing with waste management.
“The city has neither landfills nor incinerators because they’ve built what they call a decentralized waste management system. Instead of giant waste disposal facilities like landfills or the HERC that dumps or burns thousands of tons of trash every year, they deal with the waste in a city of 1.3 million people with a small anaerobic digester, a bunch of aerobic composters and plastic bailing and sorting. The citizens were also able to stop an incinerator proposal. What it takes is political will and imagination.” Khan said while he thinks Minneapolis is a leader in dealing with waste and recycling, it’s “far behind” Seattle or cities in California.
He added, “The city of Minneapolis needs to act, the state legislature needs to act, the federal government, the city, the county government, has all the power in the world to compel the cities to act. They have $50 million the last time I checked, sitting in their solid waste enterprise fund to fund Minneapolis to get to zero waste and be a national and international model.”