Activists want to close the downtown HERC trash-burner

There’s a possibility you’re breathing in the stuff you threw out in the trash yesterday. That’s because, if you live in Hennepin County, your trash is likely being burned in a nondescript building just northwest of Target Field. 

That building, with its smokestacks, is the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, or HERC, one of seven incinerators in Minnesota. It burns 365,000 tons of trash from Hennepin County residents and businesses annually, generating 350,000 pounds of steam per hour for heating downtown Minneapolis buildings. It also produces 720 megawatt-hours of electricity per day for Xcel Energy, enough to power an average of seven commercial or multifamily buildings in Minneapolis. 

Incinerators were once popular at a time when the state didn’t want to bury its trash, but some activists and legislators are calling for a change. Concerned about the facility’s effects on public health and the environment, they are calling for it, and similar facilities throughout the state, to be shut down. 

Why was it built in the first place?

As a solution to groundwater pollution caused by dumping and burying waste, the state passed legislation prioritizing the construction of incinerators in the 1980s. The law also required all Twin Cities metro area waste to be disposed of by incinerator by 1990.

Burning large amounts of trash, however, proved controversial. Hennepin County considered “processing” trash where Minneapolis houses its Solid Waste and Recycling facilities today. However, they abandoned that plan in 1984. The county ultimately decided to build the HERC at the current site near Target Field. The site was being used as a Greyhound maintenance facility, and county officials thought that site was the best suited because few people lived there at the time. 

At the time the HERC was being proposed, the county had no idea how polluting it would be until it was built and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) found toxic chemical waste, dioxins and furans already present in the air. 

Still, Earth Protector, run by Northside resident Leslie Davis, tried to sue to block its construction, contending the MPCA withheld information about its effects before a permit was issued. However, they were unsuccessful because they were not able to post a $4.4 million bond to stop construction. 

The HERC burned its first pieces of trash in October of 1989, emitting pollutants that concentrated over downtown Minneapolis. It cost $181 million to build, about $439 million in today’s dollars. 

How does HERC work?

The cavernous facility, which is accessed from a parking ramp next to Metro Transit’s Target Field light rail station, runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days per year, save for a two-week period in the spring and fall, when it powers down for maintenance. 

In 2022, the city of Minneapolis sent approximately 79,800 tons of trash to the HERC for burning, down from just over 82,000 tons in 2019. The balance comes from haulers who collect from elsewhere in Hennepin County, as well as from buildings that house businesses, nonprofits, or five or more apartments. Though the county says 75 percent of the trash burned at the HERC comes from Minneapolis, activists say most of the waste comes from suburban communities. The MSR was unable to verify that with Hennepin County, as a public records request remains pending. 

Trucks dump the trash in a wide-open cavern inside the incinerator. Some of the trash is recyclable, like paper, cardboard boxes, and plastic bottles. Other pieces of trash aren’t, such as plastic wrap. A metal claw grabs the trash and dumps it into a sheath. Magnets collect any metal in the trash for recycling. Whatever isn’t collected by magnets is immolated, as the smell of burning trash wafts throughout.

As the trash burns, it emits heavy metals, dioxins, and volatile organic compounds along with steam. The county says they neutralize flue gasses, which are fossil fuels emitted from burning, by running it through a scrubber in a boiler. They also say they neutralize the mercury and some dioxins with activated carbon, and trap everything else with fiberglass and teflon-coated bags. The bags, which have a useful life of three years, are themselves burned up once they outlive their usefulness. 

To prove the incinerator’s effectiveness on a tour of the facility, Hennepin County Energy and Environment Engineer Mark Zaban asked visitors to take a sniff test outside. “What you’re seeing [from the smokestacks] is water vapor. If we didn’t have pollution control devices, [the HERC] would smell like a burning house, burning tires out here, and that would be black smoke coming out,” said Zaban. 

“All of this is perfectly safe,” adds Hennepin County Environmental Engagement Coordinator Joseph Vital, saying that the county sometimes does a bad job of explaining things to the public. During the tour, county staff acknowledged the low waste diversion numbers and its efforts to do better. 

The state set a goal of 75 percent waste diversion by 2030; the county currently diverts 39 percent of its waste from the HERC. Forty percent of the waste that is incinerated could be recycled in some way.

“What’s big to us is the amount of waste that is generated. That’s culturally part of the capitalist system we live in,” said Vital. “With the Zero Waste Plan that the county is pushing through, which will divert 90 percent of what we’re seeing right here, that leads us to that conversation of what could then happen with this facility.”

Renewed interest in shutting the burner down

The movement to shut down HERC has gained momentum in recent years. The Minnesota Environmental Justice Table has built a diverse coalition of health, environmental, and blue-collar professionals calling for the HERC to be shut down. The push for a shutdown is in part because of the health effects, but also because of climate change, which is causing more frequent poor air-quality days. 

Stephani Booker, a Northside resident and community editor for the MSR from 2002 to 2013, received a call from her mother to stay inside earlier this year after a citywide air-quality alert. “She said, ‘The air quality is unhealthy for everybody,’ and I was like, ‘Really?’ In general, over North I smell stuff burning all the time. I couldn’t tell the difference,” said Booker. She was among dozens of activists who testified last Tuesday at a Hennepin County Board meeting about the HERC’s closure. 

The county wants to shut down HERC but has not committed to a date. Activists want it shut down by 2025, the year the county’s contract with Great River Energy to operate the plant expires. Activists expressed urgency at a rally last Tuesday over the burning of trash containing substances commonly known as PFAS, which resist grease, oil, water and heat. 

Matt Clark, manager of engineering projects at Great River Energy, thinks activists are being disingenuous because they can’t link bad air quality over North to HERC, and shutting it down wouldn’t make much of a difference. 

“We are a permitted facility,” said Clark in a phone call a day after he tried unsuccessfully to testify at a Hennepin County Board meeting during an open forum. “What the Environmental Justice Table does is they take those emissions, and they say we’re the [top] producer of emissions in the county. You can take [nitrogen oxide], or you can take [particulate matter] 2.5 or any of these elements that are bad for your health. And we are at about one percent of those emissions. [HERC] is very much safer than a bonfire.” 

Clark added that nobody knows how to manage PFAS, because nobody knows how much PFAS is entering the waste stream, though there are experiments underway in breaking down PFAS. 

Meanwhile, in February, the legislature passed a law requiring the state to generate 100 percent clean and renewable energy by 2040 and did not include incinerators as a source of renewable energy. 

For some like Marco Fields, a Northside resident, the closure of HERC can’t come soon enough. “I have a stake in getting this shut down. I have two little kids growing up. I love to ride my bike. I have friends who come here to ride their bikes. They’re breathing in all this smut. It’s gotta go,” said Fields.