Spokane is the only city in Washington that burns its garbage. Local officials say it’s a better disposal option for Spokane than putting a landfill right over the aquifer. They argue the state’s Climate Commitment Act subjects Spokane’s waste-to-energy plant to the same rules as landfills. Landfills are required to capture gases such as methane that leach from garbage and then dispose of them so they don’t become airborne. That’s impossible to do with an incinerator smokestack.
According to the act, Spokane must begin buying carbon credits next year to offset the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions. The estimated cost, according to current emissions, will be $7 million. The city said the city’s utility ratepayers can’t afford that and asked for more time to find ways to reduce the emissions and the cost. The legislature said yes, though it doesn’t give the city a full pass on next year. [Here's the link to HB 2416.]
It’s a complicated topic and we asked the city’s Public Works Director, Marlene Feist, to help make it understandable.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Marlene Feist: We emit about 100,000 metric tons of non-biogenic CO2 emissions, greenhouse gas emissions. The non-biogenic comes from the non-biological sources, so not the composting, the food waste. Those things create biogenic. What we're really talking about here is plastics and packaging and things like that. Those are the emissions that are considered non-biogenic, and that's what's under the Climate Commitment Act.
DN: Does the plant meet all of the state's emission standards right now?
MF: From an air quality standpoint, we meet all of our air quality permit requirements, yes.
DN: In terms of greenhouse gas requirements, are there greenhouse gas requirements right now that the waste-to-energy plant has to meet?
MF: Starting in 2028, based off our 2027 emissions, we were required to pay per metric ton of CO2 emissions. So that allowance price, the credit price in 2025 at the auction, was nearly $71. So if we were to pay for our emissions, that cost would have been just over $7 million at that price.
What we did was we talked to the legislature and said, you know, this is a lot for our community. This is a low-income community. Our median household income is considerably less than the rest of the state. The landfills got a path forward for managing their emissions and waste-to-energy did not. So come work with us.
Basically, we got some no-cost allowances from the state to go with the next compliance period. We get no-cost allowances equivalent to 100% of our emissions for 2027 and 2028, and then they go down by 7%, so 93% for 2029 and 86% for 2030. At that point, we would owe for all of our emissions. So in 2031, we have a larger amount that we would owe.
DN: Let me take a step back and ask, what is a no-cost allowance?
MF: So I don’t have to pay for the credit. The state is essentially giving me some free credits to start with, so I don't have to pay per metric ton I have. I get an allowance for each of my metric tons. So that's the 100% for those first two years.
But 40% of those no-cost allowances have to go into what's called a consignment account and then they are sold. And then there's cash that comes back, right? So somebody else is buying them for their compliance. So 40% of the 100 that I will get for my facility will go to this consignment account and then that cash is going to be put in a separate account that can only be spent for greenhouse gas emission reduction projects at waste-to-energy. But that also means that they're not available then for compliance through the CCA, which means that we will have to buy on the market an equivalent amount and spend that money and then provide it to the state for compliance. So instead of owing around $7 million, we think in that first year, based on that credit price from 2025, we'll owe around $2.8 million.
DN: Beginning in 2027?
MF: Yeah, in 2028 for 2027 emissions. So what we're seeing is a reduction, so like a cost avoidance overall over the four years of around $14 million. We will still end up paying over those four years probably about $12 million dollars.
Now, that assumes the credit price stays the same. You probably recall that the state is working to merge the market, our Washington climate market, with California and Quebec, which could have an impact on the credit price, the allowance price. The Department of Ecology is telling us that will reduce the price.
So that would also reduce then our compliance costs. So I'm just giving you dollars based on what the last auction price was.
DN: So the new law isn't going to have Spokane avoid costs for a period of two or three or four years. It's just going to be a lessening of those costs.
MF: Right. It's a lessening of the costs.
And then we also are going to do two important things. We're going to do a greenhouse gas study and a waste reduction study. So probably for compliance reasons, the greenhouse gas study will be the most important. How can we reduce the amount coming out of the stack? And a lot of it's on how do we get plastics and packaging out of the waste stream is probably the biggest thing.
And then carbon capture. Can we do carbon capture? How do we pay for carbon capture? And those are the things we're exploring. That's really the next big step for Spokane.
DN: As you talk about trying to pull more plastics and stuff out, is the city going to do more in terms of a public education effort to say, hey, you know, we can keep your garbage bills down if you do more of the work of pulling out your plastics?
MF: I'm sure that that will have to be part of the strategy. But as we know, it's hard to get that kind of culture change because we have single stream recycling. We actually will put just about any plastic into the single stream. But we still end up with things like cellophane, plastic bags. Those kinds of things can't be recycled and they tangle up the line at the smart center where they sort things. And so there are components that we really have to work with manufacturers on what and how they're presenting products to the consumer. This is not just something that Spokane can do on its own.
Our biggest play is really carbon capture. And so how do we do that? How do we get the funding to be able to capture the carbon as it's coming off the boilers there at waste-to-energy in terms of the where the carbon capture technology is?
DN: Obviously, that's going to get better over time, but is it cost prohibitive or cost effective right now to buy those carbon capture technologies?
MF: Well, it depends. We had a study that was done by a local company called CarbonQuest, and their initial look at it would have been prohibitively expensive. Now they've got some improvements and we're going to talk to them again. We're also talking to another company who actually is doing carbon capture on a waste-to-energy facility in Japan. There is also some pilot projects for carbon capture in Europe on some waste-to-energy facilities.
Remember, waste-to-energy is really popular in places where they don't have a lot of land to landfill or where things are like the water tables high. You find a lot more waste-to-energy facilities in Florida, for example, because you can't bury trash when you're sitting at sea level. And in Europe, where land is expensive, waste energy is much more popular than landfilling.
We also had a greenhouse life cycle analysis done of our greenhouse gases and waste to energy is better than landfilling. We looked at our specific case. If we truck our waste to landfill or rail it to landfill, what is our carbon impact? The life cycle analysis says it's less in waste to energy.
This has been our conversation with our legislators all along, which is we are better for the environment. Don't make us make a choice that makes it worse because the cost is so prohibitive for us to be able to move forward.
DN: The waste-to-energy plant is 40-some-odd years old. Is it going to continue to be useful for another generation or two with upgrades and that sort of thing?
MF: I mean, that's the key. You have to continue to invest in it. Any facility can last as long as you're making appropriate investments at the right time. Are you rebuilding the turbine on it on a on a schedule? Are you fixing? We do two outages a year to make sure that the boilers stay in good condition. So those are the kinds of things that we would need to keep investing in the facility. That's another good reason to really understand what the future of the facility is, because you want to make sure when you're making those investments that you're making the investments because the facility has that kind of life.
DN: Did you feel like the state is trying to push the city into going back into landfilling?
MF: I don't know if it's the state. There certainly are some elements that believe that landfilling is a better choice and we struggle with that because our lifecycle analysis says something different.
DN: Spokane has its Northside Landfill? Could it reopen that facility if it really had to?
MF: You know, not for the volume that we're talking about. We have an open cell at the Northside Landfill. Most of the Northside Landfill was an older landfill that we've closed and done all the Superfund cleanup sites as we did on the Southside Landfill as well.
Really siting a major landfill that we would need for everyday use in our county is not likely to happen because of the sole source aquifer that we sit over. You do not want to risk the greatest resource we have for our community, which is clean drinking water, because you're siting a landfill.
So likely we would use a landfill that's already existing by the private sector. Waste Management has a new, very large landfill in Adams County, for example. There are large landfills in the middle of the state, Klickitat County, across the river from Oregon.
DN: If you look ahead four or five years, how confident are you that this plant will continue to be allowed to operate, in terms of finding what you need to keep it and meet the state standards for greenhouse gases?
MF: I guess for us, it's can we find a way to do carbon capture on that facility? And can we find grant funding to do it? To have our community fund that technology probably is not, it's probably cost prohibitive. And also because it's not just the residents of the city of Spokane that would do that, but it's also the other tons that we're processing there from small communities like the West Plains cities, Airway Heights, Cheney. The county is also a customer of waste-to-energy.
Garbage is cyclical. We make more garbage in the summertime because we're out doing stuff and fixing our homes and we have projects. So you always have more garbage in the summer. In the winter, to really make the facility viable, we need more than the tons that are created within the city of Spokane. And so we have this great partnership, but as things become very cost prohibitive, then all these communities have to make these decisions for their communities and their residents.
DN: Have you talked to those communities to say, you know, at some time in the summer when we're all making a lot of garbage, you may have to make your own allowances for your own garbage?
MF: Yeah. Right now, the county bypasses some of their waste. It goes directly to landfill because there isn't enough capacity at waste-to-energy to take all their waste in the summertime. So we already have that system in place. We've managed it a couple of different ways. Right now, the county's managing its own bypass contract. The system used to manage it as well. So we do have a relationship with those regional landfills as a community.
It's really about how do we get the best mix of managing our waste. We also talk about things like environmental justice and social justice. We are managing our waste locally, whereas most other communities are shipping them to an even poorer community to have somebody else manage their waste, right? Where does the city of Seattle go where they're not managing really it in Seattle? It's going to the middle of the state where poor citizens get to manage their waste in perpetuity. So that's another value we have, which is we've been able to do that locally.
DN: So we'll finish with this. Over the next few years, maybe even the foreseeable future, the city is going to have to budget more money in some way to cover the new technology that needs to be folded in or other opportunities, whether it be expanded recycling, that sort of thing. The city is going to have to spend more money over the next few years to get rid of its garbage.
MF: Absolutely. So right away, next year, we're going to have a $2 to $3 million bill for compliance because of that consignment portion of the no-cost allowances. That gives us some money as seed money to be able to do some things around reducing of greenhouse gases. But this is something that we're going to have to budget over time. We talk to council about utility rates every year. This year, we're going to be talking about utility rates for ‘27 and ‘28. And this is going to have to be part of that conversation.
Credits are a hard thing to explain and how they work. And you're really working in a commodities market, which is another thing that's really interesting as a local government. The purchases that we're going to have to make is kind of interesting because we're going to have to figure out how to do that in our environment. Right now, I can only sign up to $50,000 of a spend. Otherwise, it has to go to city council. And so how do we do that for what could be multimillion-dollar credit purchases? Even just the logistics is going to be something that we really have to work on soon.
DN: It sounds like one of the goals is we're just going to have to create less garbage.
MF: Absolutely. We talk a lot about zero waste, but what does that actually mean? It means that you have to become a less consumptive society. You're going to have to figure out what makes more sense for a healthy future. If you have a pair of socks coming from Amazon, do you need a box that's this big with six pounds of bubble wrap? Probably not.
