Hunger Strikers Give Hennepin County a Deadline on HERC

For Black residents living in North Minneapolis’s North Loop and Jordan neighborhoods, the struggle is no longer abstract.

For years, environmental activists have said the county withheld reports, cherry-picked data and relied on talking points to avoid accountability over HERC. The trash incinerator has burned garbage from white and BIPOC households across the county for nearly four decades. Studies have shown that Black residents are more likely than white residents to experience higher rates of asthma and other pollution-related health issues.

“I came to organize for closure of the trash burner known as HERC a year ago when I began hearing about what 37 years of burning trash has done to our community,” said Natasha Villanueva, a Northside resident and one of the hunger strikers who lives in the Jordan neighborhood. “I witnessed a pattern of being complicit and complacent that has led decades of elected officials to allow this trash burner to keep operating even though it is long overdue for closure.”

The hunger strikers and their supporters are calling on the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners to vote to close HERC by December 2027. County commissioners have yet to vote to initiate a closure. In October 2023, the board voted to close the facility at some point between 2028 and 2040. Advocates criticized the 2023 vote because the plan does not legally bind the county to close the plant.

Organizers dubbed the action a deliberate “consumption strike” — a protest tied symbolically to waste itself, with a moral and spiritual dimension.

“People have lost patience,” said Geoff Dittberner, a coalition leader. “All traditional advocacy has failed.”

Allegations of a Cover-Up

The coalition’s grievances go beyond air quality data.

“I have watched the COVID pandemic kill so many in North Minneapolis, including Mel Reeves, the first community leader in this iteration of the long fight to close HERC,” said Nazir Khan, co-founder of the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table. “And I know people were made more vulnerable to COVID because of HERC’s poison.”

Mel Reeves, the former MSR journalist and longtime critic of HERC, died in January 2022 from complications of COVID-19. His official cause of death was COVID-19, though coalition members contend that decades of pollution exposure compounded residents’ vulnerability to the disease.

Khan, who also leads the Zero Burn Coalition, said conversations with at least one HERC employee revealed broken filters, holes in smokestacks, frequent shutdowns for repairs and machinery malfunctions — details he described as a key reason he became involved in the closure effort. A worker injury in 2017 left one employee hospitalized for six months, according to Khan’s account. The coalition has also alleged that two workers died at the facility in 1996 and that the deaths were covered up.

Khan pointed to the 2019 closure of the Detroit Renewable Power incinerator as a precedent.

“Detroit closed its burner in 2019 because of carbon monoxide violations due to poor combustion,” Khan said. “HERC would have the same violations if its permit wasn’t so weak.”

Environmental groups had documented more than 600 violations of federal carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide limits before threatening a citizen suit under the Clean Air Act. The facility announced it would permanently close after the threat.

The coalition further alleges the county has withheld reports and cherry-picked data in its public presentations about HERC’s health impacts — a charge backed in part by a technical analysis from a former EPA scientist.

A Question of Science

The community’s push to close HERC is backed by a technical report released in July 2025 by Doug Gurian-Sherman, a risk assessment scientist who previously worked at the Environmental Protection Agency assessing human health risks from industrial sources. His report, produced for the Zero Burn Coalition, argues Hennepin County has systematically understated the dangers posed by HERC’s air pollution.

“HERC is the biggest industrial source of air pollution in Hennepin County, producing pollutants that cause asthma, cancer, heart disease, neurological and immunological illness,” Gurian-Sherman said. “The county insists that HERC’s EPA-based permit ensures that its pollution is safe. But in 2008 a federal court found that EPA was in violation of its own regulations on incinerators and ordered them to fix it. It took them until 2024 — 16 years — to propose revised standards. HERC would be out of compliance with those standards for several major pollutants.”

Using the county’s own census-tract risk data — including slides that county staff possessed but did not include in public presentations — Gurian-Sherman calculated that cancer risk from HERC is approximately 3.7 times higher for residents of the North Loop tract compared to more distant, predominantly non-environmental justice neighborhoods. Non-cancer risk in that same tract is roughly 3.4 times higher.

“The county also falsely claims that people closest to HERC face no greater risk than those farther away,” Gurian-Sherman said. “The risk to the people close to HERC is several fold greater than the risk for cancer and non-cancer diseases several miles farther away. And the city’s own analysis, by the way, confirms that. Which raises the question of why the presenter for the city didn’t understand her own data.”

Among the pollutants of greatest concern are dioxins — HERC has been documented as one of the state’s largest emitters — and PFAS, so-called “forever chemicals,” which have been detected in leachate at the SKB landfill in Rosemount, Dakota County, where ash from HERC’s combustion is trucked for disposal.

The county’s risk analysis relies heavily on a program called MNRisk. Gurian-Sherman noted a critical gap: it does not include particulate matter, which he called one of the most serious pollutants produced by HERC. An independent assessment using a separate EPA tool found that HERC’s particulate pollution alone may be responsible for one to two premature deaths per year in surrounding ZIP codes.

HERC’s operating permit has not been substantively updated since 1998. The EPA standard for long-term fine particulate matter exposure was 15 micrograms per cubic meter when the permit was issued. It is now 9. The World Health Organization recommends 5.

Data Withheld from Former State Lawmaker

Karen Clark, a former state legislator who now leads the Women’s Environmental Institute, described how her organization first pieced together health data linking pollution sources to community outcomes. When WEI researchers went to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency asking for relevant data, they encountered an unexpected obstacle.

“One of our scientists was told that the information was in a box under some desk,” Clark said. “They had it, they just weren’t analyzing it or publicly sharing it according to location, race or poverty statistics.”

WEI eventually mapped the data with help from the Minnesota Legislature’s GIS department, overlaying pollution sources with race and poverty statistics.

“What the data revealed is alarming,” Clark said. “It still is.”

‘Every Person Deserves Clean Air’

On Tuesday, Audua Pugh stood outside the Hennepin County Government Center and described what it means to carry decades of polluted air in your body.

“In 2024 I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” said Pugh, executive director of the Jordan Neighborhood Association. “I have no genetic history of this disease in my family. What I do have is a lifetime of living surrounded by polluters.”

Pugh lives near HERC, which sits in one of the most pollution-burdened corridors in the state. For decades, racially restrictive housing covenants barred Black residents from buying homes in most of Minneapolis, confining them to a narrow band of North Side neighborhoods. When those covenants were struck down, redlining by banks and realtors kept the same boundaries largely intact. North Minneapolis became the place Black families were allowed to live — and the place the city chose to site its highways, industrial operations and eventually its trash incinerator. HERC opened in 1989. Wealthier, whiter suburbs across the metro that generate much of the waste the facility burns successfully resisted having it built near them.

Julia Johnson, director of organizing at Black Visions, said her organization joined the Zero Burn Coalition because of a basic principle.

“Black Visions joined the Zero Burn Coalition because we believe every person deserves to have clean air no matter their race, class or ZIP code,” she said.

Pugh drew a direct line between decades of disinvestment and her own diagnosis. She pointed to the recent closure of the GAF roofing materials plant in North Minneapolis as proof that change is possible.

“That didn’t happen because a corporation decided to do the right thing,” Pugh said. “It happened because people refused to accept pollution as a cost of living in North Minneapolis. That is proof that we can build a place where we all can breathe free. The same is possible with the HERC. And unlike GAF, HERC is owned by Hennepin County. They can vote to close it.”

Pugh noted that the county made commitments years ago that have not materialized. “Two years later there is still no date, no vote, no process and no plan.”

Because of her own health, Pugh said she cannot join the hunger strike. Villanueva put the stakes plainly: “Our leaders must protect the children that play in our neighborhood.”

The Recycling Detour

Even as advocates push for closure, they are watching a parallel county proposal with alarm. Hennepin County has explored converting HERC into a mixed waste processing facility — what critics call “dirty recycling” — that would sort and recover recyclable materials before disposal. The Zero Burn Coalition argues the proposal, which it estimates would cost roughly $180 million, would recover only a fraction of recyclable material and lacks meaningful community input.

The coalition favors upstream solutions, policy changes, reuse programs and expanded education, which it estimates could achieve greater diversion at roughly $44 million. The county has countered that closing HERC would increase regional waste disposal costs, a claim the coalition disputes, saying the facility operates at a deficit and that the cost framing is designed to discourage closure.

Legislative Allies and a Bill

The effort has support in the state legislature. Reps. Esther Agbaje and Fue Lee and Sen. Omar Fateh backed proposed legislation that would update HERC’s operating permits, which have not been substantively revised since 1998. Advocates describe the current permits as “zombie” permits — outdated standards based on what was technically feasible decades ago, not what is safe for human health.

The Hennepin County Board of Commissioners meets Tuesdays at 1:30 p.m. at the 625 Building, 625 4th Ave. S., Minneapolis.