It’s Baltimore County’s trash, but it’s going to continue to be burned – 215,000 tons of it a year – in an incinerator that is Baltimore City’s biggest industrial source of greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s the upshot of the 4-3 vote of the Baltimore County Council on Tuesday to approve a new contract with WIN Waste Innovations, operator of the trash-burning facility whose emissions stack looms over I-95, the Horseshoe Casino and Westport in South Baltimore.

“It’s just wrong for the county to keep dumping its trash in the city,” said Jennifer Kunze, Maryland director for the advocacy group Clean Water Action. “The county had alternatives on the table and they chose the worst one.”

Kunze and other advocates have long pressed county leaders and lawmakers to find other ways of handling solid waste rather than sending it to be burned at the 41-year-old facility.

“Pollution from the incinerator affects both Baltimore County and Baltimore City, but it affects the city worse, and South Baltimore, in particular, even worse,” Kunze said.

“It’s just this massive environmental injustice that the already overburdened areas of the city have to endure pollution from people’s trash from miles and miles away in the county.”

“A necessary evil”

Under the agreement, the county will pay the New Hampshire-based company about $68 million to accept its garbage over the next five years.

The county could then reevaluate annually for another five years, potentially continuing its reliance on the incinerator (still referred to in the city as BRESCO) for a full decade at a cost of nearly $155 million.

This is longer than the County’s current six-year contract with BRESCO which ends this year.

• Voting yes: Council Chair Mike Ertel and Councilmen Julian E. Jones Jr., Pat Young and Nino Mangione.

• Voting no: Councilmen Izzy Patoka, David Marks and Todd Crandell.

At the voting session, Ertel acknowledged the facility pollutes. But because the county has not developed greener approaches to reducing and disposing of waste, signing a new contract was “a necessary evil.”

For this, Kunze said county government leaders have only themselves to blame.

“They absolutely should have been doing more to lay the groundwork, starting a couple of years ago,” said Kunze. “They should have been doing a lot more, a lot faster.”

Scott Under Pressure

Community and environmental advocates have been making the same demands of Baltimore City, which sends a similar amount of garbage to the BRESCO incinerator every year. (In 2023, state data shows, about 296,000 tons of city trash went to BRESCO.)

Mayor Brandon Scott is under particular pressure to cut the city’s decades-old ties to the facility which releases particulates, heavy metals and nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide which cause respiratory irritation and contribute to smog and ground-level ozone.

In October 2020, after he backtracked on a campaign promise to support ending the city’s use of BRESCO, Scott made a new pledge:

“Under my administration,” he told The Brew, “we’re going to work to not burn as much at the incinerator as possible. And I will work my butt off to make sure that this is the last time we ever give them a new contract.”

“I will work my butt off to make sure that this is the last time we ever give them a new contract”  – Scott’s pledge in 2020.

The day of reckoning is coming, with the city’s current contract with BRESCO set to expire in 2031.

Has Scott kept the city on track to end its use of the incinerator by then? Unlike his firm 2020 promise to do so, Scott’s answer today, sent via a DPW spokeswoman, was largely aspirational.

“The City of Baltimore remains committed to reducing its reliance on both incineration and landfilling by investing in waste diversion programs, expanding recycling and composting, and supporting infrastructure that advances our long-term zero-waste goals.

The City’s 10-Year Solid Waste Plan provides a framework for reducing reliance on disposal through strategies such as reuse, recycling, and composting. Our goal is to minimize waste generation and maximize resource recovery while building a waste management system that is fiscally responsible, environmentally sound and socially equitable.”

Kunze’s answer to the same question, was blunt. She said the city has not been keeping up the pace of infrastructure development laid out in DPW’s Less Waste Better Baltimore, a “zero waste” roadmap.

• South Baltimore activists call absence of zero waste funding in city’s FY26 budget “a betrayal” (6/9/25)

“The Bowley’s Lane compost facility, for example, is currently funded at 1/8th the level the Less Waste Better Baltimore plan says we need,” Kunze noted.

The city has assured advocates that full funding is on the way, she said, but time is growing short and other infrastructure is needed as well.

Could Baltimore possibly keep Scott’s 2020 promise?

“I would say we’re falling behind, but there’s room to catch up,” she said. “If infrastructure projects are seriously invested in over the next five years, it could be done.”