Pennsylvania’s Waste Crisis: What We Burn, Who Pays, and How Reuse Can Fix It

Pennsylvania holds a grim title: it’s one of America’s favorite dumping grounds. Each year, millions of tons of garbage roll in from New York, New Jersey, and beyond, finding their way into landfills and incinerators that sit in the state’s poorest communities. On paper, it looks efficient: wealthier municipalities pay to make their trash vanish, and struggling towns cash host-fee checks to plug budget holes. But the ledger doesn’t show the people left breathing toxic air.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Chester, a majority-Black city on the Delaware River and home to the nation’s largest waste-to-energy incinerator that everyday burns 3,500 tons of garbage — the weight of seven fully loaded 747s. Chester generates only 1.5 percent of that waste, yet its children are hospitalized for asthma at three times the state average 

For more than three decades, Zulene Mayfield and Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) have fought this injustice. In June 2025, Mayfield received the Paul Robeson Lifetime Achievement Award for her work demanding clean air and dignity for Chester residents. And this year, her fight reached City Hall: Councilmember Jaime Gauthier introduced the Stop Trashing Our Air Act, a resolution calling on Philadelphia to end its contracts with Reworld’s Chester incinerator. It’s proof that grassroots organizing is forcing the city to reckon with its complicity.

Pennsylvania’s Blind Spot: The Hidden Cost of Imported Waste

Trash is lucrative. The state collects $2 per ton in recycling fees and $4.25 per ton for environmental stewardship, while local governments negotiate millions more in host payments. In the 2010s, Pennsylvania took in 6 to 10 million tons of out-of-state waste each year, more than any other state. In 2013, DEP reported inflows had fallen to about 6.4 million tons. But since then, the trail has gone cold.

Recent DEP reports highlight how much Pennsylvanians recycle — 5.31 million tons in 2023, avoiding 7.45 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions — but they no longer reveal how much waste is imported from other states). It’s a troubling blind spot. Pennsylvania remains a disposal hub, but the public can’t see the true scale of the burden.

And in the end, whether trash trucks roll in from Newark or North Philadelphia, it is Pennsylvania’s frontline communities — Chester, Beaver County, the rural townships lined with landfills — that pay the price in asthma, polluted water, and poisoned air.

Recycling Was Built to Distract — and It’s Failing Pennsylvania

Meanwhile, the supposed solution of recycling is collapsing. Globally, fewer than one in ten plastics are recycled In the U.S., the rate was just 9% in 2015 and has since declined . The other 90% is landfilled, burned, or left to leak into the environment.

The hidden costs are staggering. The global externalities of plastic — health damage, ecosystem collapse, emissions, and cleanup — reach $300–460 billion each year The packaging sector alone loses $80–120 billion annually in materials after one use, while pollution adds another $40 billion in damage. 

Recycling’s biggest trick isn’t just that it fails — it’s that it shifts blame onto people. Toss your yogurt cup wrong and suddenly you’re at fault for climate change. But consumers didn’t ask for multilayered cartons or PFAS-coated takeout boxes. This model was designed upstream by corporations and policymakers, locking our food system into disposables while shifting accountability downstream.

Sometimes the harms were known; other times science revealed them later. Either way, communities are left holding risks they never chose.

Who Pays for Pennsylvania’s Trash Economy

Companies like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Unilever flood the world with billions of throwaway bottles while advertising themselves as sustainability leaders. The Story of Stuff Project is calling them out — demanding that these corporations fund the transition to reuse instead of hiding behind recycling slogans. This is where people need to step up to bat: by holding corporations accountable and pushing cities to invest in circular infrastructure.

Because here’s the truth: air doesn’t stop at county lines. What leaves a smokestack in Chester drifts across the region. Poisoned air and water are never contained. We all live downstream.

A Better Path: How Reuse Wins for Health, Equity, and Cost

There is another way. When institutions — universities, hospitals, the food service sector — recognize that their reliance on disposables is funding illness and pollution, they also see the business case for reuse. The evidence is clear:

• Reuse Wins shows U.S. foodservice operators spend $24 billion a year on disposables, yet every dining hall studied saved money by switching to reusables.
• ReThink Disposable case studies show small businesses saving $3,000 to $22,000 annually.
• At House of Bread, a soup kitchen, the switch saved $1,600 a year and eliminated 120,000 pieces of trash 

Reuse works. It saves money. It protects health. And it builds the kind of resilient infrastructure we desperately need.

The end of the plastic age won’t come with a single law or technology. It will come when we stop mistaking disposability for normal, when cities stop paying to burn garbage, and when communities demand better. That shift is already underway — in Chester, in Beaver County, in neighborhoods across Pennsylvania where people refuse to look away.

The question is whether we will join them, and make reuse the rule rather than the exception. Get involved by joining our coalition here. Every dollar raised goes to fueling local reuse projects in neighborhoods near you. When you donate to our organization those funds are directed to purchasing reusables for our partners to help them transition and support us in providing technical assistance. 

ECHO Systems is building a reuse economy that keeps waste out of incinerators and supports small businesses across Philadelphia. Donate today to help make reuse the rule, not the exception.

To receive more in depth information and resources about local waste prevention, check out our Philly Talks Trash Quarterly Publication, join that Newsletter here.