In Sept. 2025, the Delaware County Council unanimously adopted a Zero Waste Plan after four years of development, a milestone for local communities and environmental groups working to shut down the ReWorld (formerly Covanta) incinerator in the city of Chester, PA. The Plan offers guidelines for municipal waste management that differ significantly from current practices, envisioning the phase out of waste incineration in Delaware County by prioritizing less environmentally harmful methods such as recycling, composting, and landfilling.
According to a life cycle analysis (LCA) included in the Plan, incineration — burning trash and dumping its ash into landfills — is 2.3 times more harmful to the environment and human health than directly putting trash into landfills.
Mike Ewall, founder and director of the Energy Justice Network, served on the Plan’s advisory committee and was actively involved in its development. In an interview with The Phoenix, Ewall noted that conducting the LCA played an instrumental role in the county’s decision to shift from incineration to landfilling.
“One of our big accomplishments is getting that study put together and released,” Ewall said. “It is the first time that I’ve seen a county commission a report to do this kind of thorough analysis to say which is better — incinerators versus landfills.”
Sintana Vergara, an assistant professor in the Swarthmore engineering department, told The Phoenix that while landfill is not an ideal long-term solution, it is still better than incineration because it avoids combustion and the resulting mass release of air pollutants.
The ReWorld incinerator — formally known as the Delaware Valley Resource Recovery Facility — is one of the largest waste-to-energy facilities in the U.S. Currently operated by a private waste management company, it processes more than 1.23 million tons of trash each year from Delaware County, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York City using mass-burn technology.
Since its construction in 1991, the facility has been at the center of a public backlash over its massive pollutant emissions and the consequent health impacts — such as youth and adult asthma and COPD — on the Chester community. Given Chester’s predominantly African American population, many have cited the situation as a textbook example of environmental racism.
Vergara explained to The Phoenix that waste incineration produces harmful byproducts, including dioxins and furans — both of which are persistent, long-lasting, and carcinogenic. The process also releases a variety of air pollutants that pose health risks. Although air pollution control technologies can remove many of these compounds, they are not capable of eliminating them completely. Another concern with ReWorld is its outdated emission standards, Vergara pointed out, since many were grandfathered in under 1990s regulations that would not be permissible if the facility were built today. “So, there are definitely health impacts, no question — and those health impacts are borne most by the people who live closest to the incinerator,” she concluded.
Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL), a local environmental advocacy group, continues to combat the decades-long health effects linked to nearby industrial facilities, including ReWorld. The organization holds annual events to raise awareness about pollution-related illnesses such as asthma and cancer, honor the memory of those who have died, and rally the community around resistance and environmental justice. Zulene Mayfield, one of the founders of CRCQL in 1992, told The Phoenix about the meaning of these events: “It’s an acknowledgement that these people are not statistics […] Everywhere I go, people always cite me statistics, and it frustrates me; I’m sitting there internally screaming, because I know the statistics that you all are citing — all of these statistics have names for me. We know these people; they are family members and they’re our friends.”
B. Preston Lyles, an organizer with Delco Environmental Justice, highlighted the challenges Black communities face due to environmental racism. Lyles argued that while corporations and government agencies continue to ignore and dehumanize these communities by placing industrial facilities near their homes, grassroots organizing remains difficult because of financial constraints. In contrast, white residents in suburban areas — despite being much less directly impacted — are often more involved in environmental groups. “White people generally have more discretionary income, and they can afford to spend more time volunteering,” he said.
In Chester, the fight against ReWorld has been particularly arduous, with progress repeatedly delayed and obstructed. “When it comes to poor communities, there seems to be no urgency,” Mayfield told The Phoenix. “And it’s not only that they [non-Chester residents and stakeholders] have the mentality of ‘let’s continue to do what’s comfortable for us, even though it’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s dangerous, it’s harmful,’ but that they’ll put up twenty reasons why they can’t do something, versus doing the one right thing that they can do.”
According to Ewall and Preston Lyles, the Zero Waste Plan began as a proposal to fulfill Pennsylvania’s Act 101 (1988), which requires each county to develop a ten-year municipal waste management plan. During the revision process, the concept of “zero waste” was introduced, eventually evolving into a separate Zero Waste Plan that was later approved independently of the county’s original state-mandated plan.
Ewall told The Phoenix that the language of “zero waste” was adopted deliberately, with a clear intent of shutting down ReWorld in mind: “The whole plan is not saying that individuals must stop producing any waste, or that we expect [the county’s waste] to literally get to zero. It’s about how we shift the entire system toward one that prohibits incineration — because zero waste is defined internationally as meaning no incineration.”
However, the ReWorld incinerator’s shutdown is unlikely to be realized in the short term — at least not within a year, according to both Ewall and Preston Lyles. The Plan is just one crucial step toward it among a series of efforts. In 2019, for example, advocates pushed the county’s solid waste authority to remove the waste commitment from their renewed contract with ReWorld. On Sept. 18, 2025, the Stop Trashing Our Air Act was introduced, a bill that prohibits the city of Philadelphia — one of the source municipalities that processes its trash through ReWorld — from contracting with companies to incinerate the city’s solid waste or recyclables.
In addition to pressure from local governments, the almost-34-year-old ReWorld incinerator also faces aging equipment and increasing maintenance costs. “It’s really a question of how long before it falls apart or burns down, as one that the same company runs in Miami-Dade County did almost three years ago. […] But let’s say it’s able to run until it’s 50 years old, then [these are] what we are doing to get it shut down sooner.”
The change in the local political climate in recent years is another factor that brought hope to advocates’ efforts to close ReWorld. “Republicans used to run the whole county, including its Solid Waste Authority. They were very pro-incinerator and very corrupt — they had a solicitor for the Solid Waste Authority who was getting paid three different ways. There were people whose family members were hired to get paid and not do their job,” Ewall said. He noted that Delaware County’s current financial problems are the result of years of mismanagement. Currently, the Democrats run the county council. Ewall observed, “They have responded to the pressure from us and others who have been advocating around the incinerator.”
Looking into the future implementation of the Plan, Vergara noted that simply diverting from incineration — or even from landfilling in the future — shouldn’t be the final step, and that to live in an environmentally friendly way is not through technology, but through reducing our consumption. “We want to just adopt one technology that will sort of make all of our trash disappear. But the reality is, we need to think about why we are producing so much trash. And that’s part of what I think is really good about the Plan — although I think it could go even farther — is that the biggest environmental solutions happen upstream. If we don’t even produce the waste to begin with, we don’t have a problem downstream,” she said.
Regarding potential roadblocks, Ewall told The Phoenix that while he does not recognize a philosophical barrier that renders people intentionally opposed to environmental justice, they often run into financial and legal obstacles. The two entities involved in carrying out the Plan are both facing difficulties: The county’s Office of Sustainability is understaffed and lacking the capacity and infrastructure to implement everything in the Plan, and the Solid Waste Authority is experiencing financial hardship.
“The Solid Waste Authority is doing better than it was just a few years ago because it raised its rates to start building up the funds it needs,” Ewall explained. “But they’re still ‘addicted to’ taking ash from the incinerator and industrial waste from other places to fill up their landfill, because that’s how they make money. That financial incentive is part of the problem.”
Ewall added that many of the county’s financial challenges stem from the Trump administration, noting that funding for various programs was supported under the Biden administration but has since been halted. He also pointed out that because politicians are often reluctant to tax industry and corporations, many cities, counties, and jurisdictions are now facing financial strain, which, in turn, will impact funding for environmental justice programs.
