Slate Belt Heat Recovery Center no longer shown
on Synagro's map of shitpiles across America
The SBHRC was announced in a press release in late November 2016, which was also on Synagro's website. Here is the pertinent section of archived press releases in chronological order today:
The "Big News" that Synagro was opening a plant in Plainfield Township used to
be between the top two entries in this list
Prior to last week, there was a page devoted to all the shitty details about this project. This page is now absent. Prior to its removal, it looked like this:
Synagro hype referred to Green Knights
as an "economic development" organization
Synagro makes it appear like this is wonderful for the community, and that an economic development organization is partnering with them. In reality, Green Knights is just a part of Waste Management. It was first revealed by Green Knights president Carlton Snyder that "contractual obligations" were factored into Green Knight agreeing to sell its waste energy to Synagro. In other words, they did no have a choice. It was later revealed that Green Knight would not even be selling "its" waste heat to Synagro, but rather Waste Management would, in what Synagro project manager Jim Hecht called a "complicated" arrangement. Green Knights buys its landfill gas from Waste Management to burn to create electricity, but Waste Management "owns" the waste heat that is a byproduct of burning the gas. Sweet! Waste Management would have tossed "up to a maximum of $100,000" to Green Knights annually, and raked in potentially a few million a year from the waste heat going up Green Knights' stacks. Synagro would also have raked in millions, and supported 12 to 16 low quality jobs shoving shit around a building. "Economic development" this was not.
Another revelation during review of this proposal was that although Synagro advertised that its product may be used as a fertilizer or a fuel, it would likely never be used as a fuel. Biosolids expert Trudy Johnston, a member of the Mid Atlantic Biosolids Association, hired by both Pen Argyl and Plainfield Township, stated that in her opinion biosolids will never be used as a fuel in the state of Pennsylvania. There is only one plant in the entire US that burns biosolids as a fuel.
What this means is that Synagro's product, these unwanted crap pellets, would have ended up on a farm near you. 100 tons a day, distributed all over the Lehigh Valley and across the mountain in Monroe and Schuylkill counties. Synagro makes its money on the front end, to haul the crap (no pun intended) away from sewage treatment plants. If they could dump it somewhere, they would be rolling in it. They have to pay to dry it first, to convert it from Class B to Class A, which does little to nothing to reduce or eliminate the toxins in it. It was learned in November 2018 that 352 known pollutants are in biosolids, 60 that are hazardous, with no known metrics for how much of any of these pollutants is too much. This stuff contains PFAS and PFOS, and the state of Pennsylvania and others are struggling currently with how to regulate these.
Is Synagro really not planning to pursue this project? Why would they give up? We'll take a look at that in the next post, and we will compare the arc of Synagro's proposal in Plainfield Township to that of Nestle Waters' failed attempt to take hundreds of thousands of gallons a water a day out of Eldred Township - the project that launched this blog. There are multiple similarities. For now, people across the Slate Belt as well as neighbors to the west and north can breathe a tentative sign of relief. Nestle moved on to Centre County, where they were quickly ejected by the community. What will Synagro do next?
