Waste transfer facility doesn’t belong in business park, dozens say

NEW BEDFORD — Dozens of city residents, environmental advocates, and local elected officials told state regulators that Parallel Products’ proposed waste transfer facility doesn’t belong in the city’s business park.  

Close to 40 of the roughly 100 attendees at Wednesday night’s public listening session at the Casimir Pulaski Elementary School spoke against the project, expressing concerns over truck traffic, noise, fire risk, quality-of-life impacts, and increased cancer risk that they argued the facility would bring to the surrounding residential area.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, which is weighing the project’s approval, held the meeting to hear comments from residents after delaying a decision for more than a year.

Residents said that these issues, combined with the presence of environmental justice communities and New Bedford’s issues with legacy environmental pollution, should lead MassDEP to deny the site suitability application. 

“Waste transportation has absolutely no place near a residential area,” said Mike McHugh, a North End resident. “The proposed waste transfer station will only make these impacts worse for myself, my family and my community.” 

Parallel Products has been developing its New Bedford expansion since 2018. It has operated a glass recycling business in New Bedford’s business park dating back roughly a decade. The company has been doing business locally under the name South Coast Renewables. 

At the proposed facility, workers would unload trucks full of municipal solid waste. They would sort recyclables out of the garbage and process or sell them. The workers would then repackage and ship out the remaining garbage via train or truck. That trash would be incinerated or buried in other towns and states. 

It would handle up to 1,500 tons of municipal solid waste and construction and demolition debris per day. 

South Coast Renewables has been going through MassDEP’s site suitability application process since February 2023. If the state determines the application meets its criteria, the project would move forward to the New Bedford Board of Health. 

The Board of Health would then issue a public notice, conduct its own review, and hold public hearings before deciding whether to allow the project to be developed. 

Audience members who spoke at Wednesday’s hearing did not believe South Coast Renewables should make it that far. 

Some noted public health concerns over truck traffic bringing in hundreds of daily garbage truck trips to the North End. New Bedford resident Lorene Sweeney said diesel garbage trucks are notorious for emitting nitrous oxide, particulate matter, and ground-level ozone. 

She said the fumes would impair air quality in New Bedford, and could spread around Bristol County — which has received poor grades for air quality over the last several years from the American Lung Association. Those emissions would directly affect children and teachers at the schools surrounding the project in the North End, she said, along with the rest of the city.

Wendy Morrill, president of local environmental advocacy group South Coast Neighbors United, enlisted help from area resident Nicholas Gula to demonstrate the noise issue that will also come with these trucks. 

Gula dressed up as a garbage truck and blasted truck noises from a speaker between comments throughout the meeting. 

“I just want you to think about how annoying and disruptive that was,” Morrill said at the meeting.  

“Now imagine it’s multiple trucks, not just one. Imagine it’s every two minutes while you are trying to talk or listen to someone … imagine it’s not here in this school during this two-hour meeting, but in your neighborhood and your home every day.”

New Bedford City Councillor at-Large Shane Burgo said that while South Coast Renewables has promised noise levels at the facility will not exceed 10 decibels above ambient levels at night, backup alarms from trucks and trailers can be as loud as 97 to 112 decibels. 

Noise pollution can lead to health problems like cardiovascular issues and increased diabetes risk once operations begin, he said. 

Other attendees pointed to concerns over fires, environmental contamination and cancer risk that may come with a trash transfer station. 

McHugh said fires are a common occurrence at waste processing facilities like the one South Coast Renewables is proposing. He said that if there is a fire, and the Pine Hill Acres neighborhood needs to evacuate, the only way to leave the neighborhood is to go toward the fire. 

He added that liquid containing environmental contaminants could leach from the garbage in idling trucks, and run off into local wetlands like the Acushnet Cedar Swamp. 

Leo Choquette, New Bedford’s Ward 1 City Councillor, talked about growing up next to Crapo Hill Landfill in Dartmouth, and the high rates of cancer in both the area and in his own family.

“That’s the legacy of trash,” he said. He added that if the state would not stop the project, he and organizers would get the federal government involved. 

Erica Kyzmir-McKeon, a communities and toxics senior attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, told officials that New Bedford “already bears far too many environmental burdens.” The city is home to two Superfund sites, one closed landfill, two inactive dumps, one former waste site, and 11 brownfield sites.

“Putting a waste transfer facility in a community that already bears so many environmental and health burdens is the exact opposite of equitable,” she said. 

Studies have suggested that property values could drop by as much as 13% near the waste facilities, said Sabrina Davis, an environmental coordinator for the Coalition for Social Justice. 

New Bedford resident Ken Costa added that many of the residents — largely working-class people and retirees — do not have the financial means to move away from the facility once it goes in.

Others still pointed to the fact that the transfer station wouldn’t solve the waste crisis. 

The facility would not succeed in its goals to remove significant recyclables from the waste stream, in light of Massachusetts’ existing recycling programs and soilage from mixed waste, Morrill of South Coast Neighbors United said. 

She added that there is no incentive to develop and deploy actual solutions to the waste crisis — like composting and waste reduction programs — as long as “there is money to be made from it, and the people who live, work, attend school and engage in recreational activities in this community are acceptable collateral damage.”

Some local elected officials decried that the decision to bring a solid waste transfer facility into New Bedford’s business park was made behind closed doors, between South Coast Renewables, the New Bedford Economic Development Council, and Mayor Jon Mitchell’s office. (City officials negotiated a host community agreement with South Coast Renewables in 2022. The terms dictate that the city would not publicly oppose the facility, if the company dropped its plans for biosolids processing on the property.)

Officials also argued that the facility would threaten local livelihoods and that residents did not get an adequate say in it. 

“We need to be sure that their quality of life remains exactly how it always has been, and that we don’t do what our mayor did, which is sell out the residents of the City of New Bedford,” said New Bedford City Councillor at-Large Linda Morad.  

MassDEP officials said they would review the comments received during the hearing and in the written public comment period before issuing a final decision on site suitability for South Coast Renewables. 

The comment period for the project is set to end on Dec. 4. 

Email Adam Goldstein at agoldstein@newbedfordlight.org.

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