Global report names HERC as Northside pushes closure

Audua Pugh has no family history of breast cancer. What she does have, she said, is a lifetime of living surrounded by polluters.

“Two years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” said Pugh, executive director of the Jordan Area Community Council. “This is why environmental justice is not abstract. This is very personal to me.”

Pugh was one of several speakers at an Oct. 13 rally and press conference at the Jordan Area Community Council, where the Zero Burn Coalition renewed its call for Hennepin County to close the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, the downtown trash incinerator known as HERC. The event came the same day the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) released “Burn Book: Incinerators that Threaten the Climate, Public Health, and Our Pocketbooks.” The report spotlights HERC as one of 20 incinerators worldwide.

The rally kicked off the local leg of GAIA’s Global Week of Action to Stop Incineration, which ran through Oct. 16.

“It should not take international attention for these concerns to receive the attention they deserve,” said Arwa Alakech, president of the Zero Burn Coalition’s University of Minnesota chapter.

HERC has operated on the edge of North Minneapolis since 1989. It burns roughly 365,000 tons of garbage a year, about 75% of it from Minneapolis, and converts it to energy. Coalition members said the facility runs under a decades-old permit, with many pollutants tested only once a year or not routinely monitored at all.

The coalition is asking the County Board to vote this year to close the incinerator by the end of 2027, install continuous, real-time emissions monitoring that is available to the public, and hold HERC to the emission limits set for new incinerators rather than its older permit.

In October 2023, the Hennepin County Board directed staff to develop a plan to close HERC sometime between 2028 and 2040. Advocates said the plan released in February 2024 called for a future board vote to set a closing date, and that vote has not happened. The Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey have called for the incinerator to close by the end of 2027.

“Instead of setting an actual date for closure, as commissioners had committed to doing, it said that there must be another county board meeting to set a date and vote,” Pugh said. “That vote did not happen. It still hasn’t happened.”

Pugh, who lives in District 2, called on her commissioner, Board Chair Irene Fernando, to lead on the issue.

“Permitted does not mean safe,” she said. “HERC sits on the edge of a historically Black and working-class North Minneapolis neighborhood. That is not a coincidence of geography. That is environmental racism, and Hennepin County is part of that pattern.”

Gene Harvey, a North Minneapolis resident and Jordan Area Community Council board member, said he could see HERC at night for years without knowing what was happening inside. He said learning more raised questions he still can’t answer, like how many of his neighbors have gotten sick.

“Chair Fernando, I am one of your constituents,” Harvey said. “I am asking you to listen to the people who live here, take our concerns seriously, and begin the process of closing HERC. Because we live here, we breathe this air, and we matter too.”

In a statement, Fernando said she opposes closing HERC until there is an operational plan for the roughly 1,000 tons of trash that arrive there each day.

“Setting a firm closure date without an operational plan for the cities, businesses, and residents who rely on this service is not responsible governance,” Fernando said. “Closing the HERC without an operational alternative for the trash does not make waste disappear. It sends it straight to landfills.”

She said landfills produce methane and threaten groundwater and the nearby communities, which are often lower-income. “I do not support trading one environmental justice harm for another,” she said.

Fernando said she authored the 2023 resolution the board passed unanimously to plan for HERC’s closure, which she called the first successful action toward ending incineration in the facility’s history. She said she supports the county’s proposal to convert HERC into a pre-sort and recycling facility, but the City of Minneapolis favors fully decommissioning it. Because cities decide where their waste goes, she said, any timeline to end burning depends heavily on the city’s plan for its trash.

Fernando, who lives in North Minneapolis, said public reports show HERC has operated on average 80% below its permitted levels over the past decade.

“That does not make the status quo acceptable,” she said. “The systemic harm our neighborhoods have carried from decades of decisions in how public dollars have been invested is well documented. For the role government has played in that, I truly apologize and it is why I am working toward a responsible closure and a just transition.”

Speakers from other parts of the county said the issue reaches beyond the Northside.

Judy Gregg, an Excelsior resident and constituent of District 6 Commissioner Heather Edelson, said she thinks about her own grandchildren, who grew up playing sports in clean air, while children in North Minneapolis face some of the highest asthma rates in the Twin Cities. Two friends of hers on the Northside each have a grandchild with asthma, she said.

“Instead of being out on a baseball diamond or running on a track like my grandkids were able to do, some children are spending their time in the emergency room because they cannot breathe,” Gregg said. She urged Edelson to redirect money budgeted for repairs to the aging facility toward monitoring equipment.

Joe Hesla, a retired Minneapolis and St. Paul teacher who lives in South Minneapolis in District 4, accused commissioners of misleading the public about HERC’s dangers. He called on his commissioner, Angela Conley, to bring a closure vote to the board.

“The question isn’t whether Commissioner Conley knows about these concerns. She does,” Hesla said. “The question is what she’s going to do about them.”

Mary Blitzer, deputy director of the Sierra Club North Star Chapter, said the group’s members want the board to voluntarily adopt modern federal standards for incinerators, especially as federal environmental protections are being rolled back.

“Even the limits set under Trump’s EPA are stricter than what the HERC burner is currently required to meet,” Blitzer said. “If stronger protections are recommended by modern science, why should a publicly owned facility continue operating under outdated, weak standards?”

Coalition members pointed to a transition plan developed with Zero Waste USA, which they said shows reuse, recycling and composting could create more jobs than HERC does today.

In a statement, Hennepin County Chief Public Relations Officer Carolyn Marinan said the board reaffirmed its position on HERC earlier this year and that the county is committed to zero waste “to accelerate the closure and repurposing of HERC.”

Marinan pointed to the county’s role in passing the 2024 Paper and Packaging Reduction Act, its expansion of organics recycling to more than 106,000 households and nearly 500 grants totaling $3.44 million for community-led zero-waste efforts over the past three years.

She said HERC’s air pollution control system continuously monitors some pollutants and is overseen by a technician around the clock, and that its emissions have always been significantly below federal and state permitted levels. The county did not say which pollutants are monitored continuously or whether a vote to set a closure date is scheduled.

Commissioner Angela Conley did not respond to a request for comment by press time. Edelson’s office said she was out of the office and unavailable to comment before press time.

“All we ask for is honesty,” Alakech said in her closing remarks. “We just ask you to publicize your emissions and work with us to build a better future away from incineration.”

For more information on the Zero Burn Coalition, visit zeroburncoalition.org.

Jasmine McBride welcomes reader responses at jmcbride@spokesman-recorder.com.