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The Indianapolis Board of Public Works voted narrowly Wednesday to continue sending the bulk of Marion County’s waste to an incinerator that burns trash to create steam energy through 2035.
The seven-member board voted 4-3 to approve the new contract with Reworld, formerly known as Covanta. Sam Beres, the interim director of the Department of Public Works, cast the tiebreaking vote in favor of the contract.
The incinerator at 2320 S. Harding St. on the city’s southwest side has long been a source of controversy, with some environmental advocates arguing it has adverse environmental and human health impacts.
The contract requires that city haulers bring all waste to the incinerator, with the exception of recyclable materials and waste the incinerator won’t burn. That includes types of waste that are hazardous, come from demolition or contain remains or other medical waste. Anything not incinerated for steam goes to the Southside Landfill.
The city pays a price per ton to the incinerator, also known as a tipping fee. Beres said the starting tipping fee for 2026, which is $42 per ton, would equal $12 million if all city waste went to the incinerator. About 60% to 70% of the city’s trash typically goes to the incinerator.
Although previous contracts have included a minimum tonnage the city must give to the incinerator, the contract approved Wednesday does not.
Reworld sells the steam created by the incinerator. As part of the agreement, the city receives 10.8% of the revenue from the steam. Beres said that payment is usually about $2.5 million annually.
The contract begins Dec. 17, 2025, and ends Dec. 30, 2035.
Several board members questioned the expeditious decision, which locks the city into a decade of continuing to burn waste.
“Why do we burn trash?” Leslie Schulte asked representatives from the Department of Public Works.
Natalie Van Dongen, deputy director of planning and policy, said the environmental impacts were considered as part of the request for proposal process. Three proposals were submitted, she said.
“There are carbon impacts, and methane impacts associated with landfill disposal in the same way that there are impacts associated with incinerators,” she said. Because the incinerator creates steam that then feeds the city’s energy loop, that is factored into environmental reporting.
Additionally, Beres said there’s “no perfect solution for how to dispose of solid waste” and pointed to the involvement the Office of Sustainability had in the process of selecting a contractor. The Office of Sustainability exists within the Department of Public Works.
Other members of the board questioned the speed of the decision. The proposal was added to the agenda as a “walk-on” item, included in a revised agenda that board members received on Monday. It did not appear on an agenda posted for the public on the city of Indianapolis website.
Dan Haake, a member of the Board of Public Works appointed by the City-County Council, said a previous incinerator plan received pushback in 2014 when presented before the city’s legislative body. He questioned why such a decision didn’t involve the entire 25-member council.
“This is a policy decision to burn trash for another 10 years, and we’re making it by an appointed board,” Haake said. “It’s a bigger decision than the Board of Public Works.”
The amount of information that can be shared during the procurement process is limited, Van Dongen said. She said those involved in the procurement process have signed non-disclosure agreements, but the DPW may share details “in the future” once contracts have been signed.
“We’ve only been able to speak at a high level about our procurement process,” she said.
Although board members broached the idea of postponing the proposal, DPW officials said there’s a tight timeline for renegotiations and some information couldn’t be disclosed. Daniel Stevenson, administrator of strategy and technology, said the pending request for proposals for a trash collector could not move forward without certainty as to where the trash would be dropped off.
Alison Sigman, procurement manager for the city, said a meeting with any in-depth discussion on the request for proposals would need to be closed to the public due to confidentiality agreements.
Ultimately, Beres moved that the board vote to approve the contract.
“I’m honestly not sure what other option we have,” he said.
Pam Francis, president of the environmental advocacy Circular Indiana, told IBJ that the organization is not surprised but is disappointed in the administration for committing to the incinerator for another 10 years.
“It seems we keep moving backward relative to other comparable cities,” Francis wrote. “Incineration has a responsible place in the waste management hierarchy, but not at the top.”
Indianapolis has a long history with the company. In 1988, when it was called Ogden Martin Systems, it burned its first load of trash.
In 2014, the Ballard administration inked a deal with Covanta to develop a proposed $45 million single-stream trash facility. All household trash would go to that facility, where recyclable materials would be plucked out. The remaining trash would be burnt for steam energy and Covanta would sell recycled materials on the commodity market.
Under the deal, Covanta promised to recycle at least 18 percent of the waste stream and increase the city’s recycling participation rate to 100 percent—because people wouldn’t have to opt into the system.
However, concerns about the rate of recycling diversion, the quality of the recyclables, and the closure of a similar plant in Alabama cast doubt on the plan. The city won a legal battle in 2015 against a private citizen and two paper companies that aimed to halt the deal, which was set to run through 2028.
Not long after his November 2015 election, Mayor Joe Hogsett halted the plan. What emerged instead was the current deal with Covanta, along with an opt-in recycling option through Republic Services and Waste Management.
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Burning organic trash to make steam usually fine. If it were to decompose in a landfill, the same amount of energy would be released as would the same amount of CO2. By burning the trash ourselves, we get to use the energy of the trash rather than have it diffuse as entropy while polluting all the same same.
Gets a little more complicated when we talk about plastics, but that can be thought of as a form of oil recycling. Different set of pros & cons, but not the end of the world.
Organic trash is typically only 40% of trash pickup. Thus, what is happening to the other 60% trash; this is typically metals, etc. which do not burn and generate sludge that the incinerator then needs to dispose of in a landfill.
A better solution than incineration for organic trash is recycling and composting or anaerobic digestion. Both are higher priority for the circular economy and material sustainability.
Incinerators are a reasonable way to dispose of most types of waste, but the process used to make this decision doesn’t seem to be how we want the city making that decision. Concerning!
Poor governance, for a decision this big to be added at the last minute at an appointed-board level. An efficient way to hide things. We need reporters examining all city deals in depth.