People concerned about air and water quality may assume that a plant burning garbage is bad for the environment, which is why residents of Maryland’s Montgomery County – with a population of 1.2 million – are talking about closing their incinerator – which has operated for 30 years — and trucking trash to one of two Virginia landfill in Chesterfield or Amelia Counties.
Enter Vivian Thomson, a retired professor of environmental policy at UVA. She now lives in Maryland and works with an environmental group called Friends of Sligo Creek. In her opinion, it might make more sense to keep the county’s incinerator going.
“The county committed to do a number of studies over the years to see if the incinerator was having an impact on local air quality. Those studies found no perceptible effect.”…