After facing neighborhood opposition, a company that converts waste to energy is abandoning its plans for downtown Fayetteville.
About 40 people gathered in the old sanctuary of Second Missionary Baptist Church on Thursday to speak out against Waste Energy Corp’s plan to operate a facility on South Cool Spring Street in a predominantly Black and lower income neighborhood.
“We agree to pull out,” said Scott Gallagher, chief executive of Waste Energy Corp. “It sounds like it’s just going to be a no-go on the place altogether.”
The Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation announced last month that Waste Energy would convert plastic waste to diesel fuel at a plant at the site. It would be the California-based company’s first waste-to-energy facility since its move away from software development, consulting and digital asset industries.
Leading up to the town hall, those opposing the plant already got a small victory: Gallagher told CityView on Monday that the company was seeking another location to conduct pyrolysis, the process the plant would use to heat plastics in an oxygen-free kiln or furnace and produce diesel fuel. He said the company would possibly use the two South Cool Spring Street warehouses to sort and store waste plastics waiting for processing.
Now the location is off the table for Waste Energy.
Residents were concerned the plant would cause air and water pollution. They brought up Fayetteville’s history of contamination from PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” in the Cape Fear River and the county’s drinking water and groundwater from manufacturing plant Chemours.
Environmental Protection Agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian found the air pollution from plastics-based fuels was so toxic that a quarter of those exposed to it across their lifetime could get cancer. Other communities have fought against similar plants, including in Pennsylvania.
Gallagher said the science and technology of his company’s plant would prevent environmental degradation and severe health outcomes. Waste Energy Corp plans to use artificial intelligence technology to sort its plastics, ensuring none containing PFAS are processed into fuel.
Gallagher also told CityView the plant’s emissions would go beyond American environmental regulations to meet the more stringent European standards.
“We’re breathing the air there. I’m going to be there a lot. My partner’s going to be there. He’s got a degree in environmental science,” he said. “Air quality’s hugely important to us.”
Gallagher told CityView after the townhall that Waste Energy Corp and the Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation are reexamining other Fayetteville locations to see if any are appropriate for the plant. He emphasized that Waste Energy is only looking at properties already zoned for heavy industrial use and far from any residential areas.
While many attendees on Thursday opposed Waste Energy’s plant entirely, former N.C. House of Representatives member Elmer Floyd said he believed there was space for it somewhere.
“This community has another location that they can find to locate this plant,” Floyd said to attendees. “And I do believe that the people here will be in support of a new location.”
Gallagher said Waste Energy’s goal is to stay in Fayetteville. However, he said the company is looking into sites in other parts of the state should the city not work out. He said it is also searching in South Carolina, Oklahoma, Florida, Ohio and New Jersey.
One battle doesn’t win the war
Thursday was not the first time Fayetteville residents have come together to oppose an industrial project. In 2022, Foxfire neighborhood residents fought to move a natural gas regulator out of their backyards. In 2023, activists criticized Cumberland County’s expansion of the Ann Street landfill into a neighborhood where 75% of residents are Black or other people of color.
Last year, residents of north Fayetteville raised concerns about a rezoning for a masonry company in their neighborhood. They’d later say the facility was causing air pollution and health problems.
“We’ve been fighting against environmental racism for years,” Larry O. Wright Sr., former Fayetteville City Council member and current pastor at Heal The Land Outreach Ministries, told the town hall’s crowd. “This is nothing new.”
Pamela Carter, B Street neighborhood resident, said the community “dodged a bullet” by convincing Waste Energy Corp to look elsewhere. But the debate raised a larger question at Thursday’s meeting: How does an area a few thousand feet away from homes get zoned for heavy industrial use?
Areas zoned for heavy industrial use allow for “heavy manufacturing, assembly, fabrication, processing, distribution, storage, research and development and other industrial uses that are large-scale in nature and may have the potential for adverse environmental and visual impacts,” according to the City of Fayetteville’s Development Guide.
Gallagher told residents that Waste Energy Corp chose the South Cool Spring Street location partly because of its zoning designation, as the company doesn’t want to go through the process of getting an area rezoned. Robert Van Geons, president and CEO of the Fayetteville Cumberland Economic Development Corporation, emphasized that if the community doesn’t want another industrial project to come in, it needs to rally to get the site rezoned.
“We’ve got to make a strategy to turn it into what the community wants versus what it is today, which is a vacant industrial building,” Van Geon said to the crowd. “It’s clear what you all don’t want there. But you have a building there and it’s industrial. Someone’s gonna try to fill it. So let’s change the dynamic: not what we’re against, but what we’re for.”
Plans floated by attendees to get the site rezoned included a community center for youth and a daycare facility. Floyd, along with town hall organizer and former Cumberland County Commissioner Charles Evans, hope residents will help to develop a formal proposal to bring to the city’s Zoning Commission.
“I hope we can rezone that area and turn it into something good for the community,” Carter said at the town hall. “We deserve it.”
CityView Reporter Morgan Casey is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Morgan’s reporting focuses on health care issues in and around Cumberland County and can be supported through the CityView News Fund.
Good article and write-up on this….thank you to CityView for keeping the community informed on this.
I’m curious to know who currently owns this property? It has been vacant forever.