Water + Pollution
Immediate Closure of Montgomery County’s Aging Trash Incinerator Demanded Following Disclosure of Additional Dioxin Leak
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 26, 2026
Media Contact:
Lauren Greenberger
Vice President, Sugarloaf Citizens Association
lgreenberger@hotmail.com
Immediate Closure of Montgomery County’s Aging Trash Incinerator Demanded Following Disclosure of Additional Dioxin Leak
DICKERSON, Md.— Following our February 20, 2026, press release on the topic, Sugarloaf Citizens Association received notification that a second and more hazardous dioxin and furan discharge occurred at the Montgomery County waste incinerator in Dickerson, MD.
The Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection has released two statements about this leak: Feb 20, 2026 and Dec 17, 2025. The most recent test results show Unit 3 total dioxins and furans discharged averaged 54.8 ng/dscm at 7% oxygen, exceeding the limit of 30 ng/dscm at 7% oxygen.
This discharge is nearly double the allowable limit and 30 times greater than the average annual stack test results (2.6ng/dscm) for the past 3 years, according to data reported on the County website. There are no established safe limits for dioxin emissions. We are not aware of any similar testing done yet on the third operating boiler, Unit 1.
The incinerator, operated by Reworld, is currently the endpoint for all the county’s non-recyclable solid waste.
Given this updated and highly concerning test result, Sugarloaf Citizen Association urgently calls on Montgomery County leadership to act:
We ask the County Executive and his Department of Environmental Protection for immediate closure of the waste incinerator as a response to this emergency and temporarily haul the county’s trash by truck to an interim landfill site.
We ask Montgomery County Council members to approve the County Executive’s FY27 budget that will include permanently shuttering the incinerator, ending toxic ash dumping on a community in Virginia, hauling what we can't recycle to a well-vetted landfill, and initiating robust food-scrap composting, and other well-studied waste reduction strategies.
Dioxin Leak at Dickerson Incinerator Prompts Call for Closure
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 20, 2026
Media Contact:
Lauren Greenberger
Vice President, Sugarloaf Citizens Association
lgreenberger@hotmail.com
Dioxin Leak Adds Urgency to Shuttering Montgomery County’s Aging Trash Incinerator
DICKERSON, Md. — Alarmed by reports of a recent massive dioxin leak at the aging Montgomery County trash incinerator in Dickerson, MD, Sugarloaf Citizens Association (SCA) urges the Montgomery County Council to move forward expeditiously with plans to end trash burning and haul the county’s waste to vetted landfills outside the County.
The incinerator, operated by Reworld, is currently the endpoint for all the county’s non-recyclable solid waste.
In November 2025, a report by the county’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) revealed that the incinerator was emitting nearly double the permitted limit—and 21 times more dioxin and furans than the last test in 2024. There is no safe emissions limit established for these toxic chemicals.
The dioxin leak from the 30-year-old incinerator comes amid longstanding concerns about health hazards to the community and local agriculture associated with trash incineration, which also produces other toxic chemical emissions such as mercury, sulfur dioxide, arsenic, beryllium, lead, nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter into the region’s air.
“Further delay by DEP or the County Council is unacceptable,” says Lauren Greenberger, SCA vice president. “We have advocated for an alternative to incineration for more than a decade, given the incinerator’s profile as the worst single source of air pollution and greenhouse gases in Montgomery County. This recent leak is yet more evidence that this aging facility is a continuing dire public health threat.”
Reworld estimated in 2025 that it would cost from $50 million to $100 million to keep the facility operating safely and efficiently for another 7 to 10 years. More recently, DEP cited potential costs as high as $365 million in that timeframe. Most trash incinerators are decommissioned after approximately 22 to 27 years of use.
Read Article: Maryland county may spend $57 million on incinerator it wants to close
Updated June 4, 2025
In case you missed it, an article published in The Washington Post on Monday June 2 covers machinations around the Dickerson incinerator. SCA is quoted. Read the full article: Maryland county may spend $57 million on incinerator it wants to close. For those who may not have access to The Washington Post, click here to read a PDF of the full article.
Montgomery County's Sole Source Aquifer - The Good Gift
January 9, 2024
This article is excerpted from the Spring 2024 issue of Plenty Magazine. We present the initial portion of the article. You may then link to Plenty’s website to read the remainder of the piece, and see the charts and photos that accompany it.
“Our aquifer is the bloodstream for all farmers in the Agricultural Reserve. It’s what sustains us.”
Gene Kingsbury, Kingsbury’s Orchard
More often than not, when asked, folks in the D.C. metro region do not really have a fix on where the water that flows from their faucets comes from. Sure, residents and businesses know that they pay Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) for their water and sewage service, and they may know that the origin of their water is the mighty Potomac River. But as to the details—filtration plant operations, the infrastructure that delivers the water from plants to homes and businesses, what happens when there is prolonged drought, these bits are hardly known.
More mysterious to many is where roughly 25-30,000 homes, businesses and farm enterprises get their water from in the nearly one-third of Montgomery County that is wholly outside the WSSC service area by design. nd that if the story I aim to share in two parts.
Probing Toxic Chemicals in the Ag Reserve
February 22, 2023
A class of toxic chemicals called PFAS can contaminate water, farmland, wells, and crops. These chemicals have been linked to cancer and other diseases and do not break down in the environment. An organization called PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) is leading an effort to probe whether PFAS chemicals are present—and if so, to what degree—on Ag Reserve land and in water sources.
Testing to date has yielded concerning results. Levels of several forms of PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances of which there are thousands) are substantially higher than EPA recommended quantities in drinking water in Poolesville. As a result, the town closed two of its 12 wells. These concerning results also led SCA and Montgomery Countryside Alliance (MCA) to join PEER in January in calling on Montgomery County officials to prohibit the use of certain PFAS-containing fertilizers, called biosolids, on county agricultural land—to prevent further contamination of ground and surface waters.
PFAS in such fertilizers have led to shutdowns of dairies, ranches, and other farming operations in states from Maine to New Mexico. In Maryland, lab testing found high levels of PFAS in certain fertilizers. These products are used on county agriculture fields, golf courses and public lands. PFAS from biosolids migrate to surface water and groundwater. They are also absorbed by plants and ingested by humans and livestock.
PEER and its affiliated groups are now exploring the logistics of testing for PFAS in other areas of the Ag Reserve. If you’re interested in learning more, contact Tim Whitehouse at PEER, twhitehouse@peer.org.
County Deliberates on Trash Overhaul Plans in Advance of Fall Meetings
Updated September 3, 2026
The Montgomery County Council on July 28 held a two-hour meeting on plans to overhaul the way the County disposes of its trash.
The session was the first in a series that could result in a decision in October or November on whether to close the County’s aging trash incinerator in 2027 and pivot to trucking the County’s non-recyclable trash to landfills—as the vast majority of cities and counties in the U.S. do.
The County Executive, Marc Elrich, proposed such a plan earlier this year—after two years of study and analysis by the County’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). But Council President Natali Fani-Gonzalez put that plan on hold; she alleged that it was incomplete and raised too many questions that had not yet been answered. She called for more “independent” information and posed dozens of questions to DEP.
On August 19, Elrich sent the Council President and all Council members a detailed response to their questions, formulated by the County’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Executive Branch. Here’s a link to that document. Warning: it’s a 140-page PDF. However, the heart of the document is in the first 40 pages. Beyond that are support documents and appendices.
For anyone following this issue closely, the document is critical. It will likely form the basis for the Council’s discussions this fall.
SCA strongly supports the main thrust of DEP’s and Mr. Elrich’s plans to make the transition to truck hauling, landfill, and shuttering the Dickerson incinerator. Moreover, we believe DEP has addressed most of the key issues in play in the document we link to above.
At the same time, we appreciate that the Council’s dialogue on this complex issue—with a once-in-a-generation decision to be made—has surfaced issues that Council members need to understand more fully.
Two big problems have occurred as this debate has played out over the past year:
A series of studies commissioned by or done by DEP have presented some conflicting information on the pros and cons of burning vs burying trash, and
Ms. Fani-Gonzalez (intentionally or unintentionally) undercut faith in DEP as a reliable source of information on the proposed waste management transition.
Earlier this year, she asked Council staff to take a fresh look at the research and the DEP plan.
On July 28, staff presented their perspective. A written version of that was made available prior to the session. SCA combed through the document and wrote a four-page memo responding to its content. Click below to read the memo.
SCA MEMO TO COUNCIL
The Council’s next meetings on this issue will be in September. And Council President Fani-Gonzalez has now committed to multiple sessions. However, it is still not clear that the Council can and will actually reach a decision in late October and or early November. Some Council members have said they are committed to that goal so that the current Council will be the one making the decision and not the next Council, which takes office on Dec 7 (along with a new County Executive) after this year’s elections.
Other Council members have not as yet committed to making the waste overhaul decision by November.
Our concern is this: If the decision is not forthcoming and steps put in motion, DEP will be compelled to seek new Requests for Proposals (RFPs) from trash vendors and renegotiate contracts. That would almost certainly cost more money and cause delays that could go well into 2027, stalling efforts once again to get this major county responsibility resolved. (Also, the County must give Reworld, the private company that operates the incinerator, six-month’s notice that the facility is to be shut down.)