MIAMI – With a controversial decision looming on whether Miami-Dade County will build the world’s largest waste-to-energy incinerator, a potential move by the city of Miami to eliminate recycling could impact how the county manages waste moving forward.
If the city decides to stop recycling, that means more trash could be headed to county landfills, already bursting at the seams.
“The city of Miami, taking away recycling from its community is unacceptable,” said Steve Leidner, the vice chair of conservation for Sierra Club’s Miami chapter.
Angry voices were outside Miami City Hall before what would’ve been a consequential hearing on the future of recycling citywide.
“If they stop recycling, they are not going to start it up again,” said Dave Doebler, co-founder of Volunteer Clean-Up.
The Miami City Commission was set to take a preliminary vote that day on whether to allow its solid waste director “the power to stop recycling services altogether,” a move the city claims is necessary because “high contamination rates” have caused the cost of recycling to go way up.
In a statement, the city also cited an “aging fleet and outdated machinery that frequently breaks down” as reasons why it’s considering scrapping its recycling program.
“To throw that out the window from the biggest city in the county right now would be a horrible mistake,” said Sierra Club representative Ken Russell, a former city commissioner.
“It’s very urgent,” added Maddie Kaufman, program and outreach director for Debris Free Oceans. “We produce double the amount of trash per person per day here in Miami.”
The pushback is strong — and not just from conservationists but from Miami-Dade County which is grappling with a mounting solid waste crisis.
“If they were, that would probably be a greater onus on us because we take their garbage anyways,” said Miami-Dade District 12 Commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez.
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava requested the city of Miami defer the ordinance, citing legal barriers, and is in talks with city officials about working together to address the problem.
A move environmental groups applaud.
“It wouldn’t just be a greater burden on us, they do have their own trash program but it would be contrary to our legal obligation,” said Levine Cava.
“What’s at stake is that we run out of landfill space,” added Russell. “We need to reduce, not increase, what goes to the landfills, and the first step of that is by diverting the trash that shouldn’t be in the landfill.”
Miami-Dade’s landfills are nearing capacity, forced to now use private dumpsites since the county’s incinerator in Doral went up in flames in 2023, a waste-to-energy plant that used to burn about a million tons of garbage a year.
That waste, for the past year, has been hauled away by trucks and trains. Some 60,000 tons of waste each month, according to the county, are transported by Waste Management via Florida’s east coast railway to the company’s private Okeechobee landfill in Central Florida at a cost to the county of $72 per ton.
“We generate twice the amount of garbage per capita as the rest of the United States,” said Doebler. “If we want to fix our waste crisis, we must reduce and divert from away from landfills and reclaim this really valuable material, like aluminum, like cardboard, like plastics.”
Right now, the county is seriously considering building another bigger waste-to-energy incinerator to help manage its trash into the future. Environmentalists are pushing for a zero-waste solution, one that effectively manages landfill space by creating a compost campus and upgrades recycling with the latest tech and innovations, but for that to be effective, the city of Miami must be on board.
“If we eliminate our recycling program, we’re going to be just dumping everything in these landfills, and we’ll run out of capacity way too soon,” said Russell. “And so we got to start learning about how we handle our garbage and pressure our leadership to do the right thing.”
At this time, the Miami city commission has not specified when it will take up the recycling ordinance again as no date has been set.
Meanwhile, the county is scheduled to vote on the fate of the proposed incinerator during a meeting next week.