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In 1998, Bangkok civic authorities collected approximately 8,500 tons of garbage every day, most of which were removed to three existing waste facilities in On Nuch, Nongkham and Tha-raeng. Currently, the wastes that are taken to the waste facilities are either landfilled or composted. However, given the ever-increasing generation of garbage and the fact that the existing facilities have been used for many years already, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority has established several projects to increase the waste handling capacity for the city.

A current proposal envisages the purchase of four 1,350 tonnes per day municipal waste incinerators for the city of Bangkok. The Japanese bilateral aid agency Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund and a special Yen Credit Project will lend 24,000 million baht, out of which 20,000 million baht will be used for setting up the four incinerators. The National Environment Board has already given in principle support for the construction of an incinerator in On-nutch.

Unfortunately, rather than recognize the magnitude of the garbage problem and seek ways to reduce waste generation and increase recycling and reuse, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority is being misled by Japanese incinerator manufacturers into investing in the purchase of incinerators to burn the city's waste.

Table 1.0 Location of proposed incinerators

Project	Amount of garbage disposal (tons per day)	Power generation (Megawatt)	Investment Cost (million baht)
On-nutch (1st project)	1,350	25	5,000
On-nutch (2nd project)	1,350	25	5,000
Nongkhaem	1,350	30-35	5,000
Tha-raeng	1,350	30-35	5,000

Source: The National Board of Economic and Social Development (NESDB) " The Analysis Report of Foreign Aid for BMA Municipal Waste Incineration Project" March 1999.

Table 1.1 Loan sources

Project (includes sorting and composting)	Source of the Loan	Amount (millions baht)
On-nutch (1st project)	OECF, Japan	6,000
On-nutch (2nd project)	OECF, Japan	6,000
Nongkhaem	Special Yen Credit Project, Japan	6,000
Tha-raeng	Special Yen Credit Project, Japan	6,000
	Total	24,000

Source: The National Board of Economic and Social Development (NESDB) " The Analysis Report of Foreign Aid for BMA Municipal Waste Incineration Project" March 1999.

Note: The budget includes the costs for sorting garbage, composting plants, incineration system and the cost of electrical energy generation. The loan repayment will be over a period of 40 years. The interest-free period is 10 years. The interest rate is 0.75 percent.

GREENPEACE DEMANDS:

· Stop Incineration: The National Government should place a monitorium on the construction of new incineration projects and develop alternatives to existing plants in Phuket and Samui.

· Stop Exporting Dioxin: The Japanese government and its various aid agencies should stop funding incineration projects in Thailand and other Asia countries. Aid should be focused at developing waste reduction, re-use, recycling projects not incineration.

· Support Waste Reduction Community Initiatives: Some parts of the Thailand Government have supported recycling programs, however these policies seem to be considered less important. Community initiatives, such as Tri-Cycle Scavenging Movement in some parts Bangkok have made progress on developing community based recycling and waste reduction schemes. These initiatives should be strongly supported by the government

JAPAN INCIENRATION EXPORT - DOUBLE STANDARD

The Japanese policy on incinerators is characterized by an inherent hypocrisy. Even while the Japanese government is actively engaged in a domestic crusade against incinerators and their well-recognized toxic by-products such as dioxins, Japanese aid and trade promotion agencies are working in tandem to push this polluting technology to poorer Asian nations such as Thailand, China and Malaysia. Thanks to the efforts of these agencies, corporations like Hitachi Zosen, Takuma and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries have found unsuspecting customers among the industrializing Asian nations for their products.

Many successful incineration bids are dependent on development assistance programs operated by the Japanese government to persuade Asian nations to invest in Japanese equipment. Governmental loans, grants, and assistance programs from the Export-Import Bank of Japan (JEXIM), the Japanese Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) give tremendous leverage to Japanese industries seeking foreign customers. JICA typically arranges seminars, surveys and technical assistance at the request of developing nations in conjunction with development aid from OECF. These studies often serve to open promising markets for Japanese incinerator manufactures.

Even so called state-of-the-art incinerators in Japan are opposed by local communities. Growing public concern over releases of dioxins and heavy metals from incinerators and tighter regulation in Japan has led to the closure of a several of waste incinerators in the country.

Thailand: Under Fire
The proposal to incinerate Bangkok's garbage poses a grave environmental and health risk to the residents of the city. Unfortunately, Bangkok civic agencies have unquestioningly adopted the sales pitch by Japanese incinerator manufacturers.

The National Board of Social and Economic Development (NESDB) gives the following reasons for promoting incineration as a means to manage Bangkok's garbage:
· The existing system neither has the physical capacity nor the technical ability to deal with Bangkok's growing garbage problem. Incinerators provide a solution to the problem of rapidly increasing garbage.
· Landfill space is scarce and expensive. Incinerators maximize the use of landfill space.
· State-of-the-art sanitary landfills are prohibitively expensive to construct and operate compared to incinerators.
· Incineration yields electricity, a useful by-product.
· Landfills are highly unpopular among local communities.
· Landfills pose significant environmental and health threats, and have the potential to damage water sources. Setting up incinerators would minimize these risks.

All the reasons furnished above are old and worn-out arguments brought up by incinerator peddlers. Greenpeace and numerous environmental and community groups around the world have exposed incineration to be an expensive, polluting and wasteful practice. The section below tackles each of these arguments and presents the route to waste management as if the planet mattered.

INCINERATION MYTHS AND FACTS
According to the National Board of Social and Economic Development (NESDB) the following reasons for promoting incineration as a means to manage Bangkok's garbage. Many of these arguments are myths pushed by incineration salesmen, and do not stand up to scrutiny.

Myth #1 - The existing system has neither the physical capacity nor the technical ability to deal with Bangkok's growing garbage problem. Incinerators provide a solution to the problem of rapidly increasing garbage.

FACT: Incinerators can do nothing about reducing garbage generation. People produce garbage, and people must be encouraged to reduce garbage through the use of time-tested methods such as waste segregation, recycling, reuse and progressive materials policies which ensure that only environmentally sustainable material is used. Incinerators, in fact, are known to discourage segregation, recycling and reuse programs. The practice of burning garbage ends up destroying valuable resources that we should be sharing with our future generations.

Myth #2 - Landfill space is scarce and expensive. Incinerators maximize the use of landfill space.

FACT: Incinerator salespeople would like people to believe that make garbage disappear. But this is not true. Incinerators reduce garbage into toxic ash and large volumes of toxic air and water emissions. All incinerators also require a highly specialised hazardous waste landfill to contain the toxic ash generated. Typically, an incinerator produces around 1 ton of toxic ash for every 3 tons of garbage burned. Countries like the Netherlands are also forced to use prohibitively expensive landfills capable for storing the ultra-toxic incinerator ash.

Myth #3 - State-of-the-art sanitary landfills are prohibitively expensive to construct and operate compared to incinerators.

FACT: State-of-the-art incinerators, such as those that exist in the Netherlands and Germany, are extremely expensive. In addition, these incinerators also require state-of-the-art landfills for disposal of ash. There may be state-of-the-art incinerators. . . But there is no such thing as a non-polluting incinerator.

The Thailand Government proposes to spend 20,000 million baht ($540 million) on four incinerators capable of burning 1350 tons of garbage daily. The purchase will be funded by soft loans from the Japanese government. At approximately $134 million USD per incinerator, the waste burning machines proposed for Thailand are nowhere near state-of-the-art.

In 1995, a 2000 ton per day incinerator in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, cost a massive $600 million USD. At least half the investment went for pollution control equipment. Incinerators companies also charge high rates for receiving wastes. These costs, which could vary between $95 (3515 baht) and $200 (7400 baht) per ton of waste delivered to the incinerator, could end up draining the budget of civic authorities and increasing taxes.

The answer to the burgeoning waste problem lies neither in sophisticated landfills nor in expensive machines to burn the garbage. Garbage is a social problem and the solution needs to rely more on social interventions rather than technological inventions. The Government needs to invest money and effort in educating the citizens about waste segregation, and set up the infrastructure to promote segregation, waste reduction, recycling and re-use. Such schemes tend to empower the local communities and also give rise to many more jobs than an incinerator would.

Waste segregation is alive and profitable to the extent it is practised in Thailand. The Pollution Control Department (PCD) estimated that in 1995, Bangkok residents separated and sold 1000 tons per day of recyclables or reusables to scrap merchants. A separate investigation by the PCD into the composition of garbage from around the country found that between 16 and 34 percent of the solid waste consisted of recyclables or reusables.

These figures combined with the fact that a number of organisations around the country, including Klong Toey Environment Group and Magic Eye, are already engaged in programs to separate and recycle garbage indicates that solutions do exist and can be implemented at low cost. Klong Toey Environment Group which runs an egg-for-waste program among 18 communities in Bangkok reports that it processes 800 kg/week of garbage. A study by the PCD found that in 1995, a total of 128 tons of waste paper was recovered.

Myth #4 - Incinerators yield electricity, a useful by-product.

FACT: The claim that the modern garbage incinerators are a 'waste-to-energy' facility may make for good public relations. But incinerators are not power plants. In reality, they waste more energy than they produce. Recycling saves more energy than incineration yields. Two studies performed in the United States in 1993 and 1994 show that the recycling (instead of burning) of currently marketable recyclable material yields three to five times energy savings.

Experience from existing waste-to-energy incinerators clearly indicates that such plants produce very little electricity at exorbitantly high costs. For example, the 1500 ton per day facility built in North Andover (Massachusetts) in the United States at a cost of $190 million, receives garbage from about 500,000 people, but only provides enough electricity to power 28,000 homes. If the United States burned all its municipal waste it would contribute less than 1% of the countries energy needs.

The proposed Bangkok waste-to-energy incinerators will be set up at a cost of $135 million and generate 25 megawatts of electricity. The per KW investment for a waste-to-energy plant is $5400 USD per KW, between 2-5 times the cost of other energy sources. Compared to $2000 USD for hydroelectric, $1000 USD for wind and $2250 USD for a nuclear power plant, incinerators are very expensive.

Myth #5 - Landfills are highly unpopular among local communities.

FACT: Evidence from around the world shows that incinerators too are extremely unpopular among local communities. Incinerators are known to release highly toxic chemicals such as dioxins and heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury. Communities around the world have organized themselves to prevent the setting up of incinerators.

In the United States, incineration ranks alongside nuclear power plants in unpopularity. Since 1985, community opposition led to the defeat of more than 300 garbage incinerator proposals.

In the Philippines, after years of intense public opposition to incinerators, the government issued a Clean Air Act in June 1999 banning waste incinerators. Costa Rica followed suit by banning incineration in 1999.

Even so called state-of-the-art incinerators in Japan are opposed by local communities. Growing public concern over releases of dioxins and heavy metals from incinerators and tighter regulation in Japan has led to the closure of a number of waste incinerators in the country.

In Thailand, in December 1995, community opposition led to the defeat of a 300 ton per day waste-to-energy incinerator that was to be set up near Chiang Mai.

Myth #6 - Landfills pose significant environmental and health threats, and have the potential to damage water sources. Setting up incinerators would minimize these risks.

FACT: It is true that landfills do carry the potential to damage the environment and contaminate water sources. Greenpeace recommends that landfills only be seen as temporary storage systems to contain waste until appropriate technologies to make the wastes inert are developed.

Incinerators are known to severely pollute the environment both locally and globally. Existing data shows that burning hazardous waste, even in "state-of-the-art" incinerators, will lead to the release of at least three types of dangerous pollutants into the environment including:
· Heavy metals
· Unburned toxic chemicals
· New pollutants including super toxins such as dioxins formed during the incineration process

Incineration is one of the key sources of dioxin to the environment. Dioxins and furans are a class of chemical compounds widely recognised as some of the most toxic chemical ever made by humans. Often just referred to as dioxins, dioxins and furans have no useful purpose and are produced as the unwanted by-products of industrial processes such as the manufacture of PVC, pesticide production, incineration, pulp and paper bleaching with chlorine, and the smelting and recycling of metals. Once emitted into the environment, dioxins can be transported over long distances along air and ocean currents. Dioxins are known to bioaccumulate in the fatty tissue of living beings, and also biomagnify as they move up the food chain. In 1997, the International Agency for Research on cancer (IARC) classified some dioxins as human carcinogens. They are associated with a wide range of other health impacts including:
· altered sexual development
· male and female reproductive problems
· suppression of the immune system
· diabetes
· organ toxicity
· effects on a wide range of hormones

Dioxin released from an incinerator can be readily captured 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.
· In January 1998, three incinerators in Lille, France, were shut down because milk produced downwind of these facilities had been contaminated with dioxin levels three times higher than permitted sale levels.
· Residents of one property downwind of a "state-of-the-art" waste incinerator in Pontypool, South Wales, were advised not to consume duck or bantam eggs from their property.

The Phuket and Koh Samui incinerators, both of which are Japanese-built, release dioxin at levels that would be illegal in Japan or Europe. The Phuket incinerator has a recorded release of 1.59 nanograms per cubic meter ITEQ, around 15 times above the Japanese or European standards. The Koh Samui incinerator plant operators reported to Greenpeace that their facility releases approximately 4 nanograms per cubic meter ITEQ of dioxin, around 40 times higher than standards applied in Europe and Japan.

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.

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