Why Ban Incineration?

However, far from making waste disappear incinerators actually create more toxic waste, and through this pose a significant threat to public health and the environment. For example, incineration is touted as an alternative to land filling. Yet incinerator ashes - contaminated with heavy metals, unburned chemicals and entirely new chemicals formed during the burning process - are buried in landfill or dumped in the environment.

IMPACTS OF INCINERATION: EMISSIONS

When fragments of partially burned waste chemicals recombine within incinerator furnaces, smokestacks, and/or pollution control devices, hundreds, even thousands, of new substances are created, many of which are more toxic than the original waste itself.

DIOXINS - GLOBAL KILLERS

Once emitted into the environment dioxins can travel vast distances on air and ocean currents, and because of this globe trotting ability are a global contaminant. In 1997, the International Agency for Research on cancer (IARC) classified TCDD, the most toxic dioxin as a human carcinogen.

Dioxins are distributed into the environment as part of incinerator stack gases, bottom ash, fly ash and in the effluent of pollution control devices. The main route of exposure to dioxins in humans is through food intake. Once in the body they are only excreted very slowly and build up in fatty tissues. Studies suggest that people in the U.S. and some European countries now carry dioxins and furans that are at or near those levels which are suspected to cause health effects in humans.

Dioxin released from an incinerator can be readily taken up by grazing animals and fish.

• In 1989, 16 dairy farmers downwind of a Rotterdam incinerator were banned from selling their milk, because it contained dioxin levels three times higher than anywhere else in the Netherlands.

Residents of one property downwind of a chemical waste incinerator in Pontypool, South Wales, were advised not to consume duck or bantam eggs from their property.

Some waste is accidentally released when chemicals are removed from storage containers at the incinerator site, moved to transportation vehicles, or being shipped to and moved about within the incineration facility. An average incinerator burning 32,000 tonnes of waste per year will receive over 1500 tanker-truck shipments of wastes per year, or more than 28 trucks per week. According to the US EPA: "Fugitive emissions and accidental spills may release as much or more toxic material to the environment than direct emissions from incomplete waste incineration ..." There is also the risk of catastrophic waste releases in fires and explosions.

Incinerator Ash is Hazardous Waste

Leftover incinerator ash can be extremely toxic, containing concentrated amounts of lead, cadmium and other heavy metals, as well as dioxins and other toxic chemicals. Disposal of toxic ash in an environmentally sound manner is problematic and expensive. If handled properly, ash makes incineration prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest communities. If handled improperly it poses short and long-term health and environmental dangers. The better the pollution-trapping device in an incinerator smokestack, the greater the quantity and toxicity content of the residues will become. A hundred times more dioxin may leave an incineration facility on ash, than in air emissions. The average cost in the Midwest US for disposing a ton of hazardous waste is $210, compared to $23 for ordinary waste. Some experts recommend burying this ash in a landfill equipped with a plastic liner to prevent leaching into groundwater. But all landfill liners eventually leak.

INCINERATION IN ASIA

Developing countries in Asia are being swamped with proposals to build waste incinerator plants. Faced with shrinking markets in pollution-conscious Northern countries, incinerator companies are turning to Asia where they see a lucrative market for their outdated and poisonous technology.

Today, incinerators are being sold under a variety of guises – such as fluidised bed incinerators, thermal treatment plants or as waste-to-energy systems. Yet in countries, such as the Netherlands, Germany where pollution regulations are impossibly tight, incinerators still continue to incur monumental costs to clean up the pollution they cause. Many of the industrialised countries cited by incinerator salespersons as proponents of incineration technology, are rapidly shutting down their incinerators. By the end of 1998, more than 2000 industrial waste incinerators nation-wide were closed permanently or temporarily in Japan, as a result of tougher limits placed by the Japanese Government on the emission of cancer causing dioxins.

However, following developments in technology for controlling emissions to air, new incinerators are again being proposed in some European countries. Governments charged with managing industrial waste stand at a critical juncture. They can continue to approve and promote incineration, or they can encourage the development and use of clean production methods that eliminate toxic processes, products and waste.

IMPACTS OF INCINERATION: HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT

• Increased cancer rates, respiratory ailments, reproductive abnormalities and other health effects have been noted among people living near some waste-burning facilities, according to scientific studies, surveys by community groups and local physicians.
• Cancer, birth defects, reproductive dysfunction, neurological damage and other health effects are also known to occur at very low exposures to many of the metals, organochlorines and other pollutants released by waste-burning facilities.
• Many pollutants released in incinerator air emissions have been shown to accumulate in and on food crops, especially crops where the edible portion is exposed such as leafy vegetables. While thorough washing of produce may remove a portion of pollutants on crop surfaces, a significant amount (typically from 15% to 50%) will remain.

THE FAILINGS OF INCINERATION

• Incineration relies upon the continued generation of waste to support the high operating costs. Pressure to pay back the high cost of building incinerators has had the effect of encouraging and perpetuating waste generation.
• Continued investment in incineration inhibits the development of more sustainable waste minimisation practices, as well as the exploration and development of products and processes that do not use toxic chemicals in the first place.
• Dispersing persistent, bioaccumulative pollutants into the air from incinerator emissions creates more pollution problems.

INCINERATION: THEORY VS PRACTICE

In theory, a properly designed incinerator should convert simple hydrocarbons into nothing other than carbon dioxide and water. Practical experience, however, has shown that even the best of combustion systems virtually always produce PICs [products of incomplete combustion], some of which have been found to be highly toxic. Even under the strictest of standards, "state-of-the-art" incinerators emit chemicals that have escaped combustion as well as newly-formed "products of incomplete combustion" - thousands of different chemicals of which only a small fraction have been identified.

The monitoring and measuring of incinerator performance is conducted in various ways and on various levels in different countries. Actual incinerator performance can deviate radically due to "combustion upsets" such as: equipment failure, human error and rapid changes in the waste fed to an incinerator. Only a small fraction of the total volume of waste needs to experience on one these "combustion upsets" for there to be significant deviations from the targeted destruction efficiencies.

Medical Waste - useful waste into hazardous waste.

Only 10 percent or less of a typical hospital's waste stream is potentially infectious, and that can be sterilised with heat, microwaves and other non-burn disinfection technologies. The remaining waste is not infectious. Most paper, plastic food waste and other hospital waste are similar to the same waste coming from hotels, offices or restaurants, since hospitals serve all of these functions. By burning medical waste in an incinerator the basic biological problem of disinfecting infectious material - which can be dealt with by various technologies - becomes a formidable chemical pollution problem that is costly to manage and difficult to contain.

Cement Kilns

Throughout the world some 60 cement kilns have been modified so that various wastes can be burned along with conventional fuels. But cement kilns are designed to make cement and not to dispose of waste. According to a study by the US Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, emissions of dioxins are eight times higher from cement kilns burning hazardous waste, than from those that do not burn it.

Pollution Control Devices

Pollution control technologies for different pollutants are often incompatible. So scrubbers designed to filter out particulate and heavy metals, will cool the exhaust gas to the ideal range for dioxin formation. This means that decreasing the emission of one pollutant often increases the emissions of others. And no pollution control device can eliminate dioxin or heavy metal emissions completely.

INCINERATION REMOVES THE INCENTIVE TO RECYCLE AND REUSE

Incinerators with state-of-the-art pollution control equipment are formidably expensive, but once authorities have invested in incineration they often don't have the money to invest in waste reduction. In this way, incineration directly competes with efforts to reduce and recycle waste.

Incineration actually perpetuates the use of landfills because of the large quantities of leftover ash produced by incinerators. It is estimated that for every three tons of waste that is incinerated, one ton of ash is generated. And this ash is very toxic, containing concentrated amounts of heavy metals and dioxins which, when buried, will eventually leach into the soil, potentially polluting groundwater.

Very few jobs are created in return for the huge economic investment in incineration. Most of the jobs are temporary, created during the building of the plant. A large incinerator may employ about 100 workers. On the other hand, community efforts into waste separation, reuse and repair, recycling and composting, can create more jobs, both in the handling of the waste and in secondary industries using recovered material.

Also, most of the money invested in the incinerator leaves the community. The huge engineering firms that build incinerators are seldom located within a community and so most of the money invested leaves the community. On the other hand, money invested in the low-tech alternatives stays in the community creating local jobs and stimulating other forms of community development.

Recycling saves more energy than incineration yields. For instance, if the United States burned all its municipal waste in incinerators, it would contribute less than 1% of the country’s energy needs. Two studies performed in the US in 1993 and 1994 show that if the currently marketable recyclable material, which is typically burned in a modern trash incinerator, was recycled instead, some 3-5 times as much energy would be saved. The reason: Incineration can only recover some of the calorific value contained in the trash; it cannot recover any of the energy invested in extraction, processing, fabrication and chemical synthesis involved in the manufacture of the objects and materials in the waste stream. Reuse and recycling can. In fact, a wide-ranging cost-benefit study conducted for the European Commission 1997 concluded that even landfilling was better and more energy-efficient than incineration for managing household waste.