Green Bay Reconsiders Recycling Plant

Green Bay’s Plan Commission is reconsidering a permit it has already given for a trash recycling plant. The Oneida Seven Generations Corporation faces losing its permit to build a gasification plant on the city’s west side.

The proposed plant would burn municipal trash at up to 1,200 degrees. Critics, including the Sierra Club, say it is an untested technology and would be the first of its kind in the country.

John Filcher co-chairs the citizens group Incinerator Free Brown County, “This thing isn’t a magic machine that can make dioxins go away which is what you get when you melt or burn plastics.”

Filcher says the Oneida tribe has not been forthcoming about exactly what trash would be incinerated, or how many emissions stacks there will be, “They never disclosed that it’s got all these emissions and these emission towers and stacks and so forth. It’s just never given out to the city. Yet a mere few weeks later it is disclosed to the DNR. And they never went back to the city and said, ‘Hey wait a minute, none of this was disclosed to you.’”

The head of the Oneida Seven Generations Corporation is Kevin Cornelius. He is not speaking to the media while the permit process is in review. In a written statement he says the facility will meet all environmental permit requirements and that it will create, “good paying, permanent jobs.”