FAQ

The Hennepin Energy Recovery Center, known as HERC, is a trash burner that has been incinerating hundreds of thousands of tons of waste each year since 1989, located between Downtown and North Minneapolis. It sits in a densely populated, majority-Black community, burning trash sent from across Hennepin County and surrounding suburbs.

That concentration of harm is not accidental. It reflects deliberate decisions about where pollution is allowed to exist — and whose health is treated as expendable. The trash burner was built with a 20-year design life. It should have been retired by 2009 (1).

Instead, the County has extended its operation year after year while the surrounding community continues to absorb the pollution.

Clean air should not depend on your zip code. This is urgent because people are getting sick, the County has the authority to act, and every year of delay is another year of preventable harm.

We are asking the Hennepin County Board to do three things: take a public vote to close the trash burner, set a firm closure date, and establish a community-led task force to ensure a just transition to a zero-waste future. The County Board has the authority to do all three today. No new legislation required. What has been missing is the political will to act.

Every day, residents near the trash burner — and communities downwind — breathe its toxic emissions: fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen oxides, hydrochloric acid, lead, dioxins, mercury, and other hazardous air pollutants (2). These are linked to asthma, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and premature death. Multiple pollutants from trash incineration — including particulate matter, dioxins, and PFAS — have no established safe level of exposure (3). EPA modeling associates the trash burner’s particulate emissions alone with 1–2 premature deaths and $11–24 million in health damages annually, with the greatest impacts on communities closest to the facility (4).

Hennepin County Commissioners say the trash burner’s pollution is “within permit limits.” But those limits were never properly set. A federal court found that the original MACT standards used for HERC’s permit were incorrectly established. The limits are based on what pollution control equipment was capable of capturing decades ago — not on what is safe to breathe. Even by the EPA’s own updated standards proposed in 2024, the trash burner would fail to meet newer limits for hydrochloric acid and nitrogen oxides (5). The numbers are specific: an independent analysis of the County’s own emissions data found HERC’s hydrochloric acid emissions would exceed proposed standards for existing facilities by 8–21%, and nitrogen oxides by up to 7%. Under standards for new facilities, HCl would exceed limits by ~81% and nitrogen oxides by ~135% (6).

The County’s own risk assessment tool, MNRisks, excludes particulate matter and ozone — two of the six major criteria air pollutants — from its calculations entirely. Pollutants are also assessed one at a time, not in combination, even though residents breathe all of them simultaneously. When cumulative risk is calculated using the County’s own data, cancer risk for tracts closest to the trash burner already exceeds MPCA’s acceptable limits by 2–4 times — before accounting for Environmental Justice community vulnerability (7). Science has moved forward. The permit has not.

Pound for pound, yes — significantly. Compared to coal producing the same amount of energy, trash incineration generates roughly 28 times more dioxin, 6–14 times more mercury, and about 6 times more lead, along with more CO2, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides (8).

The comparison understates the problem. The trash burner tests for dioxins once a year under controlled conditions, missing startups, shutdowns, and malfunctions. Research has found actual dioxin emissions from incinerators run 460–1,290 times higher than annual stack tests indicate (9). The test is not a monitoring program — it is a snapshot taken under the best possible circumstances.

In 2023, the County Board passed a resolution to develop a closure plan (10). There is still no binding closure date and no Board vote to close the facility.

The County’s own closure plan is explicit on this point. Page 35 states that before the closure process can begin, the Board must take action to repurpose HERC (11).

That vote has never happened. Without it, HERC has no closure date — not in 2028, not in 2040, not ever.

Some commissioners have claimed the 2023 resolution will result in HERC automatically closing “as early as 2028. ”That is false. The County’s own compliance officer told Xcel Energy in late 2024 — in an email obtained through a public data request — that there are no plans to terminate operation (12). The 2023 resolution created a contingency plan. It did not set a legally binding closure date. The County Board has the authority to take that vote today. They have chosen not to.

Without accountability and transparency, delay continues. The public is entitled to a firm, public closure date; clear and accessible planning documents; transparent timelines; and open, community-engaged decision-making about plans for the future of the site.

Transparency also means accurately representing the science. County staff have told commissioners — and the public — that health risk from HERC is equal regardless of how close you live to the facility. Their own data show the opposite: risk is several times higher for residents in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the trash burner, most of whom live in environmental justice communities. The County’s risk assessment tool also does not account for the fact that EJ residents face substantially greater harm from the same level of pollution. Research shows that Black residents face roughly three times the risk of premature death per unit of PM2.5 exposure compared to the overall population. None of this appears in the County’s public-facing analysis (13).

Public funds are still being used to maintain and extend the life of an aging incinerator. The trash burner carries tens of millions of dollars in debt from municipal bonds taken out to pay for repairs. Incinerators are extremely expensive — sometimes bankrupting municipalities, as happened in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (14).

Those dollars could instead support composting and reuse infrastructure, recycling expansion and deconstruction facilities, intensive outreach and education efforts, and community-based systems that keep wealth in our communities. Continuing to invest in the trash burner locks the County into outdated infrastructure instead of building the future.

The approximately 45 workers at the trash burner deserve a real transition — not a pink slip. Any closure plan must include worker retraining, wage continuity, and a clear pathway to jobs in the zero-waste economy. A just transition means nobody gets left behind. Composting infrastructure, recycling expansion, reuse centers, and deconstruction create jobs — and those jobs should go to the workers and communities that have already paid the highest price.

Metro area landfills already have the capacity to receive what is currently going to the trash burner — no new landfills needed. An analysis by the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy shows existing metro landfill capacity is sufficient until 2054, even if the trash burner closed today (15). That is nearly three decades to build out the composting, recycling, and reuse infrastructure that should have been built long ago.

The County argues we need to reach zero waste before closing. Waste and health experts worldwide disagree (16). Incinerators are more expensive than alternatives (17), worse for public health, and they actively undermine recycling and composting by requiring a guaranteed stream of burnable material (18). The fastest path to zero waste runs directly through closing the trash burner — not around it.

Chair Fernando and Commissioner Conley have proposed converting HERC into a $120+ million Mixed Waste Processing Facility (MWP) (19). An MWP takes unsorted garbage and attempts to pull recyclables out. The problem is that this approach doesn't work well: recyclables contaminated by food waste and other garbage have no reliable end markets, meaning most of what gets sorted still ends up in a landfill or incinerator (20). The facility would be funded through municipal bonds, adding to the County's existing debt load, and would lead to much higher tip fee costs for the city. There has been no community process to decide this, and this proposal ignores community demands for housing, green space, and connection to the surrounding neighborhoods at the HERC site. Whether this proposal is even serious is an additional question.

A hunger strike is not where this campaign started. It is where it arrives after everything else has been tried. For more than 35 years, community members have testified, organized, filed data requests, and sat through meeting after meeting. They built a coalition of more than 70 organizations. They put the science on the record. In 2023, the County Board passed a resolution calling for a closure plan. Community members took that seriously.

Then, in September 2024, the County's own Compliance Manager, Randy Kiser, admitted there are no plans to terminate operation (21). The resolution produced no closure date, no process, no vote.

Meanwhile, children in ZIP code 55411 continue to go to the emergency room for asthma at the highest rate in Minnesota (22). EPA modeling estimates 1–2 premature deaths every year from the trash burner's emissions alone (23). Every year without a closure date is another year of preventable harm in a community that has already waited long enough.

We are hunger striking because waiting is no longer a neutral act. The harm is documented. The authority exists. The County Board can call a vote today. We are putting our bodies on the line until they do.

The hunger strike begins in early April. It ends when the Hennepin County Board takes a public vote to close the trash burner and sets a firm closure date. Strikers will have ongoing monitoring by health professionals throughout.

The Black, Brown, and working-class communities of North Minneapolis are not facing one crisis — they are facing many at once. That is precisely why relief on every front matters now. The trash burner has been poisoning this neighborhood for more than 30 years. The harm does not pause because other harms are present. If anything, the weight of everything this community is carrying makes the case for action more urgent — not less. There is no right time to ask an overburdened community to keep waiting.

The community that has absorbed decades of pollution deserves a real seat at the table in building what replaces it. That means a genuine stakeholder process from the start — not a decision handed down by the County after the fact.

Our vision is a more decentralized system of zero-waste hubs: composting, repair, reuse, recycling, and drop-off services, each hub tailored to local needs. This is an approach that is spreading across the world (24). A decentralized system manages waste close to where it’s created in order to minimize transportation emissions, maximize clean recycling, create good jobs, and avoid massive industrial disposal sites that sacrifice those nearby and the land. This model is spreading in the U.S. — in Berkeley, Louisville, and Monterey County.

Hennepin County's own closure plan identifies a zero-waste innovation hub (25) as a potential future direction, and their Zero-Waste Plan sets a goal of 90% diversion by 2040. The roadmap is already there. What some commissioners are currently proposing instead — a $120+ million Mixed Waste Processing facility — means no meaningful community process, no reliable end markets for the recyclables it produces, and another 40+ years of industrial use on one of the most valuable parcels in Minneapolis.

You cannot get to zero waste without closing the trash burner first. Incinerators require a guaranteed stream of burnable material — they structurally block the investment in composting, recycling, and reuse that the County claims to want. Closure is not an obstacle to that future. It is the precondition.