The New Hampshire General Court will soon be completing its 2016 session. In this final week, the House is expected to consider legislation that would support the state’s solid waste hierarchy and provide environmental and renewable energy benefits for the state and the greater New England region.
This legislation, SB 381, has already passed the Senate. It has been criticized by a handful of environmental activists, but analysis by the state’s Department of Environmental Services has shown that allowing the combustion of a limited amount of clean wood derived from processed construction and demolition materials at the state-of-the-art Wheelabrator Concord waste-to-energy facility – restricted by season and allowed only from processors that use best management practices to produce a clean wood fuel as required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – would not harm public health or the environment.
As the DES analysis showed, emissions with this new wood fuel would be 36 times below the stringent ambient air limits established in the New Hampshire Code of Administrative Rules. In addition, as DES pointed out, the Wheelabrator facility in Concord “is considered to be one of the most effectively controlled facilities of its type, and is highly regulated by NHDES.”
There are brief periods in the winter when municipal waste volumes are low, and the waste that is delivered can be wet. Allowing the Concord facility to supplement its municipal waste fuel with clean renewable wood fuel from a processing facility would allow it to operate more efficiently during these short periods.
New Hampshire has two facilities that process construction and demolition material to produce a clean renewable wood fuel; one in Epping and one in Salem. These facilities use best management practices to divert this material from landfills. According to the state’s solid waste hierarchy, creating renewable energy from waste is preferred to landfilling. Disposal, or landfilling, is the least-favored option in every state waste hierarchy that we have seen.
SB 381 would provide a small local market option for the clean wood fuel produced from the processing of construction and demolition materials. Allowing a limited amount of processed clean wood to be safely combusted for renewal energy at the Concord facility, instead of Quebec, would reduce the state’s carbon footprint by approximately 1.6 million pounds of CO2.
Lastly, this legislation is aligned with federal environmental policy. After years of study, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued its final rule on Non-Hazardous Secondary Material this past winter. In that rule, EPA added materials to the list of categorical “non-waste fuels,” including clean construction and demolition wood that is processed from construction and demolition debris in accordance with best management practices.
We look forward to passage of this common-sense legislation.
(Rep. Herb Vadney, a Republican from Meredith, and Rep. Michael Vose, a Republican from Epping, both serve on the House Science, Technology, and Energy Committee.)