ANNAPOLIS, MD – Environmentalists, social justice advocates, and community leaders testified before a Senate committee in support of the Reclaim Renewable Energy Act (SB590) on Tuesday afternoon.

The legislation, introduced by Sen. Karen Louis Young, seeks to clean up the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) which currently subsidizes trash incineration, factory farm gas and woody biomass as ‘renewable’ energy sources. 

The RPS, established in 2004, established a system for buying and selling Renewable Energy Credits – with the hopes of reducing emissions and creating “a healthier environment.” But the speakers at the committee hearing argued that directing subsidies towards trash incinerators and factory farm waste methane undercuts those goals.

Reporting from the Public Service Commission shows that in 2021, ten percent of Maryland’s “renewable energy” under the RPS came from trash incineration, factory farm gas, or woody biomass. Of the three, the most came from the burning of municipal solid waste. Since these incinerators are major sources of air pollution that directly impacts nearby communities, their inclusion in a clean energy subsidy program is a major environmental justice issue.

“Trash incineration is the dirtiest way to deal with our solid waste, so it is a slap in the face to these communities that feel the health impacts everyday to say it is ‘renewable energy,” said Shashawnda Campbell, Environmental Justice Director with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. “The only way our communities can survive is if the state stops subsidizing incineration and begins subsidizing alternatives like composting, recycling, reducing, and reusing.”

The current RPS also subsidizes factory farm waste biogas – essentially creating an incentive to generate more pollution in the form of poultry industry waste. Producing methane from factory farm waste creates air pollution in the form of smog-forming nitrogen oxides to ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. These facilities also create other environmental hazards in communities forced to live near facilities that treat hundreds of thousands of tons of solid and liquid factory farm and slaughterhouse waste. 

The current RPS subsidizes two out of state factory farm biogas – one of which, an Ohio biogas facility, has been sued by the state over EPA violations. And there are threats of inistate factory farm biogas facilities in Maryland.

“Anaerobic digestion is the latest energy scheme, which focuses on propping up the industrial chicken farming practices that have been plaguing our citizens and waterways for decades as well as creating methane gas infrastructure and facilities seeking to be placed in areas where there are already overburdened communities,” said Gabby Ross of Assateague Coastkeeper. 

“There is a pattern of misrepresenting biogas projects as a way to help our small farmers with their litter and the runoff which is currently contaminating our wells and streams,” said Maria Payan of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project. “Right now, the Bioenergy Devco project in Sussex County is part of a civil rights Title VI Administrative Complaint. We should not be promoting more problematic projects like these.”

“When new trash incinerators were proposed in Maryland, multiple communities had to fight for nearly a decade to prevent them,” said Jennifer Kunze, Maryland Program Coordinator with Clean Water Action. “We need to end subsidies for factory farm methane gas now, before communities are fighting similar battles for the next decade.”

“The inclusion of factory farm biogas in the RPS is not about clean energy – it subsidizes a dangerous form of waste management,” said Food & Water Watch Food Policy Analyst Rebecca Wolf. “The state and federal incentive programs expanding factory farm biogas facilities across the U.S. only serve to bolster fossil gas business and infrastructure.”

Fifty four groups signed a joint testimony statement that was submitted to legislators in support of the legislation. The testimony was written by the Reclaim Renewable Energy Coalition, a network of groups that has been fighting for years to clean up the state’s renewable energy program.

“The 38-year old Wheelabrator incinerator, from dawn to evenfall, impregnates the air with pounds-of-poisonous particulate matter that has created a death trap for generations of Black communities that live in South Baltimore,” said Sir James Weaver, Progressive Maryland Environmental Justice Organizer. “It is part of structural and environmental racism that puts these toxic waste industries in black communities. If power holders, in Annapolis, don’t move swiftly to support the RREA, their ‘dance with the devil’ will continue.”

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