On July 10th, the City of Philadelphia announced it had selected ReWorld — the corporation that operates the incinerator in Chester, PA — along with Waste Management and Republic Services, to manage the city’s next solid waste contract for at least four years with three years of possible renewals. The contract process has been shaped by mismanaged timelines, entrenched interests, and an inability to challenge the status quo. As a result, Philadelphia is likely facing another seven years of a waste management system that has struggled to reduce litter or strengthen the city’s environmental standing.
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A mis-managed process
It’s difficult to say whether the management of this process reflected long-standing incompetency within the Sanitation Department or a more deliberate choice, but the timeline all but ensured the contract would go to the same corporate players that have managed the city’s waste and recycling for decades. I saw this dynamic firsthand as the city’s Zero Waste and Litter Director during the 2019 contract negotiations.
Even that process felt compressed: the Request for Proposals (RFP) was drafted over the summer of 2018, released in October 2018, bids were received and reviewed in early 2019, and approved by City Council that June. This time around, the city took the notable step of issuing a Request for Information (RFI) to gather ideas from Philadelphia’s waste management experts in summer of 2025. As the months dragged on and the RFP was still not released by December, my hope was that the delay was due to the Sanitation Department revamping the whole RFP based on the information gathered.
We’re running out of time on both contracts and we need a more common sense conversation rather than zero sum debates to inform the path forward so we’re not waiting another seven years for a cleaner and greener Philadelphia.
So you could imagine my disappointment when the RFP was finally released on December 23, 2025 and it was basically the exact same RFP as 2019 with one paragraph added about wanting to explore zero waste and circular economy strategies. With bids due March 30 there was scant time for Philly’s sustainable waste management experts to weigh in. Most cities then take 3-6 months to review proposals, conduct interviews and wind the decision through the bureaucratic layers of checks and balances. After the lower end of that timeline was reached, the City issued the letter of intent to award both the Recycling and Solid Waste contracts on July 10.
Waste volumes continue to grow, and the challenges around managing it responsibly are only becoming more complex. Given that, plus the debate surrounding the incineration of Philly’s trash, it’s worth asking why the department erred on the quicker timeline of the planning window rather than expanding it?
The incineration debate
Before addressing that debate, I’d like to make it clear that the advocates of Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) are completely right in their advocacy to shut down the Chester incinerator. CRCQL has spent decades highlighting the pollution and public health impacts the ReWorld incinerator has had on Chester residents. Those concerns are real and deserve real action by both the City of Chester and the surrounding communities that send waste there, including Philadelphia.
It’s also understandable that affected residents and advocates would look to Councilwoman Gauthier’s Stop Trashing Our Air Act as a path forward. The bill would effectively prohibit the city from using incineration in any form — including the ReWorld facility and more advanced waste-to-energy technologies. I’ve spent much of my career advocating for zero-waste and circular economy approaches that reduce waste at the source. That said, even the most effective circular systems will still require some disposal capacity.
Waste volumes continue to grow, and the challenges around managing it responsibly are only becoming more complex.
What’s frustrating is watching a genuinely important debate flatten into an either/or framing. I’ve heard claims that incineration is inherently worse than landfilling because only incinerators are sited in low-income communities — a claim that isn’t accurate. I also heard an engineering professor on WHYY’s Studio 2 this past winter explain that modern landfills use comparatively “advanced” technology, likening them to “a big plastic bag in the ground” that neatly captures all of the methane and leachate (i.e. trash juice). In practice, that containment is far from guaranteed: this Southern Environmental Law Center report documented one case, among many more, where landfill leachate contaminated a community’s groundwater, and the EPA estimates landfills account for nearly 17 percent of U.S. methane emissions — the third-largest source after the fossil fuel and industrial agriculture sectors.
Where we go from here
The honest answer is that there’s no clean solution available right now — which is part of why the city defaulted to the status quo rather than exploring more innovative solutions. But there’s still room to shape what comes next. Three ideas worth considering:
- Amend the Stop Trashing Our Air Act to address the real problem rather than ban incineration entirely. The spirit of the bill’s goals are worth preserving, but a blanket ban may be ill-advised. I toured the CopenHill incinerator in Copenhagen, which the NIH has cited as one of the cleanest-operating facilities in the world — notably located just two kilometers from the Royal Palace, in a city that consistently ranks among Europe’s best for air quality. Although it does admit CO2 in the steam it releases, the advanced scrubbers and filtration systems remove 99 percent of harmful emissions such as sulfur and nitrogen dioxide (a major contributor to asthma). Requiring any incinerator serving Philadelphia to meet a comparable emissions standard could accomplish two things at once: it would likely end the city’s reliance on the Chester facility since ReWorld would be unlikely to meet that bar, and it would open the door to a cleaner facility operating within city limits.
- Use the RFI findings to strengthen investment in Philadelphia’s flourishing circular economy. In addition to Bottle Underground’s growing capacity to responsibly recycle glass and Bennett Compost’s growing capacity to recycle Philly’s organic waste, there are dozens more businesses in Philly that can better reduce, reuse and recycle. The advocacy energy should be going to making sure that our tax dollars, through the solid waste and recycling contracts, can support these growing businesses.
- Move past the framing of one interest group versus another. Multinational corporations like ReWorld and Waste Management will continue to advocate for their bottom line at all costs, which is expected. But some environmental justice advocates have mistakenly taken the same special interest approach by minimizing the real risks of landfilling in their focus on closing the incinerator, and that undercuts the broader goal. What’s needed is a more collaborative conversation among advocates, experts, elected officials, and city staff to find the best path forward for waste management in Philadelphia.
With the letter of intent already submitted to award both the solid waste and recycling contracts, and Council approval likely a formality at the start of the next session, meaningful change may no longer be possible this cycle. Who knows, maybe a common sense amendment to Stop Trashing Our Air could actually get the votes to set the city on a more effective and environmentally just waste management strategy? But we’re running out of time on both contracts and we need a more common sense conversation rather than zero sum debates to inform the path forward so we’re not waiting another seven years for a cleaner and greener Philadelphia.
Nic Esposito is the co-founder of Circular Philadelphia and served as the City of Philadelphia’s Zero Waste and Litter Director from 2016-2020.
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