Philly Bets Big on Waste—But Can It Actually Do It?

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-19 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

Philadelphia just moved a lot of trash talk from the bar into official policy. City Councilmember Mark Squilla dropped a bill this week that sets a fairly bold target: get 60% of the city's garbage out of landfills and away from the Chester incinerator.

That's a number worth sitting with for a moment.

Right now, 37% of Philadelphia's waste goes straight to the incinerator in Chester, Pennsylvania—the largest waste burner on the East Coast and, by some measures, the dirtiest industrial facility in the whole seven-county region. The rest lands in landfills, mostly somewhere else entirely, out of sight and out of mind. So Squilla's proposal isn't just rearranging deck chairs. It's asking the city to fundamentally rewire how it handles garbage over the next 20 years, with the 60% target landing around 2050 if current contract timelines hold.

Here's where it gets interesting—and frankly, where the city runs into the hard part.

The bill doesn't actually mandate this happens tomorrow, or in five years, or even in ten. Instead it orders the city to make a plan by the time the current trash contracts expire—somewhere between now and the early 2030s. Then, when those next long-term contracts come up for renewal, the city will have to incorporate waste diversion into the terms. It's a long play. Almost too long. But probably necessary, because the infrastructure to handle 60% waste diversion basically doesn't exist yet in Philadelphia.

Organic waste is the linchpin. Food scraps, yard trimmings, and other biodegradable materials make up about 30% of what Philadelphia throws away. Nobody's composting that at scale right now. The bill envisions anaerobic digestion facilities, which use bacteria to break down organic matter and produce gas for energy. That's a solid idea, something like that. But building even one facility takes years, regulatory hurdles, money. Doing it across a city takes a decade.

Recycling and reuse programs would have to expand too, obviously. And rail transport of waste, which the bill mentions as an option—actually, that's not quite right. It mentions rail as a possibility within the new contracts, not as something the city's already planning. The difference matters. Right now waste moves by truck and ship to wherever someone will take it. Nobody's talking about dedicated rail lines yet.

What makes this move interesting from a commodity angle is the signal it sends about scrap recovery and secondary material streams. If Philadelphia actually diverts 60% of its waste, that's a massive volume of recovered metals, paper, and plastics that has to go somewhere. It flows into the scrap supply chain. It changes feedstock for recyclers and refineries. Not immediately, sure. But by the time 2050 rolls around, cities that restructured their waste streams in the 2020s are going to be shipping different materials in different volumes than cities that didn't. That reshapes demand for recycling infrastructure, sorting facilities, and downstream processing.

The real question is whether this bill becomes actual planning, actual funding, and actual facilities, or whether it just gets shelved in a committee while the city keeps signing four-to-seven-year contracts with private waste companies that profit when trash stays out of the recycling loop. Squilla's got the right intent. The mechanics to make it real are somewhere further down the road.

Source: ""The plan sets goals for achieving a 60 percent overall waste diversion rate," Squilla said." — NBC10 Philadelphia

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