4th
Annual International Management Conference
Waste-To-Energy,
Amsterdam.
24-25
November 1998
A
presentation by Dr. Paul Connett
Professor
of Chemistry
St.
Lawrence University Canton, NY 13617.
Dr.
Paul Connett is a full and tenured professor of chemistry at St. Lawrence
University in Canton, New York, where he has taught for 15 years. He obtained
his undergraduate degree in natural sciences from Cambridge University and his
Ph.D. in chemistry from Dartmouth College in the US. For the past 14 years he
has researched waste management issues with a special emphasis on the dangers
posed by incineration and the safer and more sustainable non-burn alternatives.
He
has attended numerous international symposia on dioxin, and with his colleague
Tom Webster has presented six papers at these symposia which have been
subsequently published in Chemosphere. He has given over 1500 public
presentations on these issues in 48 states in the US and 40 other countries.
With his wife Ellen he edits the newsletter Waste Not, which is in its twelfth
year of publication. With Roger Bailey, Professor of Fine Arts at St. Lawrence
University, he has produced over 40 videotapes on waste management, dioxin and
other environmental issues.
Far
from it being the universally proven technology claimed by its promoters, the
incineration of municipal trash with energy recovery has been an experiment
which after 20 years has left the citizens of industrialised countries with a
legacy of unacceptably high levels of dioxins and related compounds in their
food, their tissues, their babies and in wild life. The author argues that as
the industry has struggled to make incineration safe, they have, like the
nuclear power industry before them, priced themselves out of the market.
Moreover, as they have sought air pollution control devices to capture the
extremely toxic by-products of combustion, the resulting residues have become
more problematic and costly to handle, dispose and contain. There are still
remaining concerns about the safety of incinerators, especially as they are
built in developing economies, which do not have the resources to build,
operate or monitor them properly.
However,
even if these concerns are overcome, as we move into the twenty first century,
the role of trash incineration, with or without energy recovery, will become
less and less viable, both economically and environmentally. Our future task
will be dominated by a need to find sustainable ways of living on the planet.
Those who have been preoccupied with making incineration safe have lavished
their engineering ingenuity on the wrong question. Society’s task is not to
perfect the destruction of our waste, but to find ways to avoid making it. The
argument that burning waste can be used to recover energy makes for good sales
promotion, but the reality is that if saving energy is the goal, then more
energy can be saved by society as a whole by reusing and recycling objects and
materials than can be recovered by burning them. Municipal waste is a low-tech
problem. It is made by mixing. It is unmade by separation. Both problem and
solution are at our fingertips, not on the drawing boards of Swiss or Swedish
engineers. In the longer term, after the citizen has played his or her part by
supporting source separation, reuse, recycling, composting and toxic removal,
industry has to pay more attention to the way objects and materials are made
and used. How an object is going to be reused or recycled has to be built into
the initial design decisions To recognise that it is overconsumption that is
giving us both global warming and a waste disposal crisis, is to recognise that
trash is the most concrete connection each individual has to the global crisis.
More effort has to be put into resisting the largely post-war American
philosophy that “the more one consumes the happier one becomes’”, before it
makes the planet uninhabitable. A way has to be found to tame the voracious
appetites of the multinational corporations which plunder the world for
short-term profit. This cannot be done until we as individuals find a way to
resist the skilful advertising that traps us within a whole web of false needs.
The antidote to overconsumption is community building. The fierce local arguments
that ensue over the siting of both landfills and incinerators can be used to
force these issues onto the political agenda.
Incineration
might make sense if we had another planet to go to, but without that sci-fi
escape, it must be resisted in favour of more down-to-earth solutions that we
can live with, both within our local communities and on the planet as a whole.
Both incineration and raw waste landfilling attempt to bury the evidence of an
unacceptable throwaway lifestyle. Every incinerator built delays this
fundamental discussion by at least 20 years.
As
I deliver these comments I am very conscious of the fact that many of the
people sitting in this audience earn their living from the operation of
incinerators. They will probably find many of my views antithetical to their
own. I applaud the organisers of this conference for having the courage to
allow me to speak. Too often, decision-makers do not discover the downside to
incineration until the wrath of the public is unleashed. To paraphrase the
words of Shakespeare’s character Mark Anthony, I come here not to praise the
idea of the incineration of municipal waste with energy recovery, but to bury
it. However, whether you agree with my position or not, I hope you agree with
Joseph Joubert, who said, “ ‘Tis better to debate a question without settling
it, than to settle a question without debating it”. In my view, incineration of
municipal waste looks back to the nineteenth century, not forward to the twenty
first. Indeed, the first waste-to-energy plant was operating in Hamburg,
Germany in 1895.
I
will argue that even if the finest engineers were able to make incineration
safe - i.e. captured all of the toxic emissions and found a safe method of
handling and storing the ash - from an ethical point of view, they would not
have made the incineration of trash acceptable. It simply doesn’t make ethical
sense to spend so much time, money and effort destroying materials we should be
sharing with the future. Thus, those who have set themselves the Herculean task
of perfecting the art and science of incineration, have poured a massive amount
of attention into the wrong end of the problem and produced a sophisticated set
of answers to the wrong question. As we prepare to enter the twenty first century,
society’s task is not find a new place or a new machine in which to put the
trash, but to find ways of not making waste in the first place.
When
one first hears about trash incineration it seems like a good idea. I certainly
thought so. It promised to rid our Northern NY county of 32 leaking landfills
and to produce energy as well. It seemed like a win-win situation. For a
municipal official beleaguered with the responsibility for a mountain of trash
coming at him or her on a daily basis it appears to offer a quick fix solution,
with little or no modification of the existing infrastructure for picking up
trash. For a politician with citizens yelling at him or her because they don’t
want to live near a proposed landfill, or the expansion of an old one, the
modern waste-to-energy incinerator looks like a perfect political escape plan.
It
is only when one spends time looking below the surface appeal of these
facilities that one realises the huge backward step they represent,
environmentally, socially, economically and from the point of view of moving
towards a sustainable society.
I
will discuss the arguments against building more trash incinerators under seven
headings. They are:
1.1 Hydrogen chloride is formed.
1.2 Nitric oxide is generated.
1.3 Toxic metals are released.
1.3.1 Mercury, a highly problematic pollutant, is
difficult to control.
1.4 Dioxins, Furans and other by-products of
combustion are formed.
1.4.1 Post combustion formation of dioxin.
1.4.2 The fly ash dioxin problem.
1.4.3 No continuous monitoring of dioxins
possible.
1.4.4 Rising concern about current dioxin levels.
1.4.5 Dioxin emissions easily captured in food
chains.
1.4.6 Ireland.
1.4.7 Advances in one country do not always
translate to success in others.
1.5 End-of-the-pipe control
1.6 Modifications to counteract one pollutant can
lead to increases in others.
1.6.1. UK.
2.1 Fly ash hazard often obscured.
2.2 Ash represents a Catch-22 for the incineration
industry.
3.1. Incinerators are formidably expensive.
3.2. Very few jobs are created for this massive
economic investment.
3.3 Most of the money invested in the incinerator
leaves the community.
3.4 Loss of capital is acute in developing
economies.
3.5 Taxpayers usually find out true costs when it
is too late.
3.5.1 Flow control outlawed in the US.
4.1. Modern incinerators do produce saleable energy.
4.2 Reality versus Public relations.
4.3 Recycling saves more energy than incineration
yields.
4.4 A larger vision is needed.
5.1. In the US incineration is the most unpopular
technology since nuclear power.
5.2 US development at a standstill.
5.3 Opposition in other countries.
5.4 Germany.
5.4 The dangers of ignoring public opinion.
5.5 Look at more than one option.
5.6 Even a true believer should not lead with
incineration.
5.7 The non-burn alternatives are more popular.
6.1 Landfills.
6.2 The importance of composting.
6.3 Integrated
waste management.
6.4 Five principles.
7.1 Cheap fossil fuels conceal our
non-sustainability.
7.2 Incineration is a wasted opportunity.
7.3 Forces
behind overconsumption.
7.4 Fighting the dominant paradigm.
7.5 Community building.
Introduction.
Let
me acknowledge at the outset that the incineration industry has made huge
strides in reducing the emissions of toxic substances since the 70’s, 80’s, and
even the early ‘90s. However, this improvement has not been uniform. For
example, it is only recently that France has been forced to take the dioxin
problem seriously. The industry’s task has been very complicated, their
solutions inevitably incomplete and most importantly, not likely to be
reproduced in countries where their regulatory apparatus is less competent, or
their budget is inadequate to pay for the massive costs involved. Most chemists
blink when they see more than three chemicals in a test tube. The task set by a
modern incinerator is to burn all the substances society produces in one huge
machine, as well as tapping the energy liberated to generate heat and/or
electricity efficiently. In this extremely complicated process, a number of things
occur.
Most
of the chlorine in the waste stream is converted into hydrogen chloride; a
strong acid gas which at high temperatures will attack most metals it meets.
Most of the hydrogen chloride can be removed with alkaline scrubbing devices
before the flue gases leave the stack, but not necessarily before this acid gas
has damaged some of the materials from which the incinerator is built. Furnace
linings, ductwork and boiler tubes need frequent and costly attention.
At
the high temperatures of combustion the nitrogen and oxygen in the air combine
to form nitric oxide (NO). Because this gas is neutral, it cannot be removed by
scrubbers using alkaline chemicals, such as lime. Systems involving the
injection of ammonia or urea can convert some of the nitric oxide back into
nitrogen, but these high-energy reagents are expensive (they are normally used
as fertilisers) and the removal of the nitric oxide is only about 60%
effective. Any nitric oxide that is not removed is later converted by sunlight
into nitrogen dioxide (NO2) which contributes to photochemical smog and acid
rain.
At
the temperatures of combustion many of the toxic metals such as lead, cadmium,
arsenic, mercury and chromium are liberated from otherwise fairly stable
matrices like plastics. Furthermore, they are liberated in the form of tiny
particles or gases, which, if they escape from the stack, vastly increase the
potential surface area of contact between themselves and the environment. They
also penetrate deep into human lungs, where they are rapidly exchanged with the
bloodstream.
The
traditional method of removing metals from emissions is via particulate control
devices such as electrostatic precipitators or baghouses (fabric filters). The
former, while being very robust, are less efficient at removing the tiniest
particles of concern. The latter are more efficient but suffer from breakage
and blockage and need careful maintenance.
A
particularly problematic metal has been mercury. At the temperature of
combustion it is a gas and evades the simple particulate control discussed
above. As a result trash incineration has been a major source of mercury going
into the environment. Many modern incinerators now employ activated carbon to
absorb the mercury. However, this is another expensive item, and the public needs
a way of knowing that the activated carbon is being used continuously, because
no trash incinerator, that I am aware of, monitors toxic metal emissions on a
continuous basis. Mercury removal poses several further questions.
What
is the fate of the mercury captured on the activated carbon or the fly ash
residues? Is the spent charcoal sent for reactivation, if so where does the
mercury go? Is the spent charcoal burned in the incinerator, in which case
where does the mercury go, as it can’t stay in the incinerator forever? How
does the presence of activated carbon effect the leaching and other
characteristics of ash disposed of in landfills? In hot climates will the
mercury evaporate from the ash?
Shortly
after the infamous accident in Seveso, Italy, (1976) which made the chemical
2,3,7,8-Tetra Chlorinated Dibenzo-para-Dioxin (2,3,7,8-TCDD or the singular
“dioxin”), into a household word, Kees Olie and co-workers in the Netherlands
identified this same substance in the emissions from trash incinerators. They,
and subsequent workers, also found many other members of the dioxin family
(there are 75 poly chlorinated dibenzo para dioxins, or PCDDs) and members of
the furan family (there are 135 poly chlorinated dibenzo furans, or PCDFs) in
these emissions. The major response to this discovery from consultants
representing the incinerator industry was to claim that as long as the
incinerator furnace was operated at a high temperature all the dioxins and
furans would be destroyed, however these claims were subsequently found to be
based on fraudulent manipulation of the data.
In
1985, the reason why high temperatures alone could not solve the dioxin problem
was revealed at the International Symposium on Dioxin held in Bayreuth,
Germany. Two groups showed that dioxins could be reformed after the flue gases
left the combustion chamber. It is now well established that if the flue gases
from an incinerator are passed through air pollution control devices operating
at temperatures in the range 200-400 degrees Celsius, more than a hundred fold
increase in dioxin and furan formation can take place. A strategy that would
essentially minimise post combustion formation of dioxin would require the
quenching of the flue gases immediately after they emerge from the combustion
chamber. However, this strategy conflicts with the aim of generating
electricity, because this requires the flue gases to go through boilers to
generate steam to drive turbines, thus delaying the moment when flue gas
quenching occurs.
Without
the immediate quenching system, the fly ash collected in the scrubbing devices
will be contaminated with dioxins and furans.
While
some commentators have argued that modern incinerators are net destroyers of
dioxins and furans this argument does
not hold if more appropriate dioxin levels in the incoming waste are assumed
and if the dioxins in the fly ash and the bottom ash are included. A hundred
times more dioxin may leave the facility on the fly ash, than from the air
emissions. However, until recently,
regulatory agencies, particularly the US EPA, have turned a blind eye to the
dioxins and furans left on the fly ash, even though in some cases the combined
ash (a combination of bottom ash and fly ash) is being used as daily cover in
some US landfills. In stark contrast, in Japan, as a result of growing concern
about the dioxin problem there, the government announced in 1997 that they were
limiting the total dioxin emissions (i.e. air emissions plus fly ash plus
bottom ash) to 5 micrograms of dioxin International Toxic Equivalents (I-TEQ)
per metric ton of trash burned. According to presentations made at Dioxin ‘97
in Indianapolis, this will almost certainly require the fly ash from Japanese
incinerators to be vitrified, which will still further escalate the costs of
incineration.
Even
when the most stringent precautions are taken to minimise dioxin air emissions
it is still very difficult to convince the public that the emissions are low
because there is no equipment available in the world capable of monitoring
dioxins and furans on a continuous basis. Instead, we have to rely on measurements
made on a spot-check basis, with advance notice given to the operator that they
are going to be monitored on a particular day. It is very rare for this to
occur more than once a year. Indeed, until recently, very few incinerators in
the US had been measured more than once in their whole operating lifetime.
Thus,
even with the best designed incinerators, the public is still hostage to how
well they are operated, maintained and monitored over their lifetime of 20
years or more. The potential problems are well illustrated by the Indianapolis
incinerator. This modern facility went on line in late 1988. Through tenacious
sleuthing by a local environmental group, it emerged that this facility
violated its permit limits over 6000 times, including by-passing its air
pollution control devices 18 times, in the first two years of operation. In
addition, the incinerator had 27 boiler tube failures within one year.
No
one knows what the dioxin emissions were like when these events took place. In
short, in most countries neither the regulatory authorities nor the industry
has been able to put the monitoring of dioxin from these facilities onto a
truly scientific foundation. The matter threatens to get worse as these
incinerators get built in Southern and former Eastern European countries, where
current regulatory control abilities are already low and where they have no
facilities to monitor dioxin even on a spot-check basis.
Dioxin
emissions have to be put against the backdrop of an increasing public concern
about background dioxin levels in the environment, in our food and in our
tissues.
Of
particular concern, is the fact that the highest doses of these potent
endocrine-disrupting chemicals are reaching us from our food and being
delivered to the unborn foetus. While industry spokespersons frequently argue
that dioxin emissions are extremely low (especially when compared to
conventional pollutants), the counter argument is to note that dioxins
interfere with several hormonal systems, in which the hormones function in
human tissues at part per trillion levels. A critical finding occurred in 1992,
when Dutch scientists discovered that even at background exposures dioxin was
capable of interfering with the thyroid metabolism of babies at one week of
age.
Any
dioxin released from an incinerator, be it in large quantities from badly
operated facilities, or smaller quantities from better run ones, is readily
captured by grazing animals and fish. In 1986, Tom Webster and I calculated
that one litre of milk would deliver as much dioxins as a human would get
breathing the air next to the cow for eight months.
More
recent calculations indicate that in one day a grazing cow puts as much dioxin
into its body (from dioxin which has deposited on the grass), as a human being
would get if he or she breathed the air next to the cow for fourteen years.
This is not just an academic affair. In 1989, 16 dairy farmers downwind of a
huge incinerator in Rotterdam, were told not to sell their milk, because it
contained three times higher dioxin levels than anywhere else in the
Netherlands.
This
situation continued until 1995 by which time the incinerator had been
retrofitted. Nor was this concern put to rest in 1995. In January of this year
(1998) three incinerators were shut down in the Lisle area of France, because
local milk produced downwind of these facilities had been contaminated with
dioxin to levels three times higher than the permitted sale level (5 parts per
trillion TEQ in the milk fat).
Ireland
provides an indicator of how large the legacy of dioxin pollution from
incinerators has been. A little publicised report from Ireland indicates just
how extensive the contamination of the European milk supply from dioxin has
been. Dr. Christopher Rappe analysed 32 cows’ milk samples from different parts
of Ireland.
The
reported levels ranged from 0.12 to 0.51 ppt. (parts per trillion) of dioxin I-TEQs
in the milk fat, with an average of 0.23 ppt. These levels are much lower than
the levels reported in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, France and the UK. In my
view it is significant that Ireland has no trash incinerators.
Again
and again, optimistic reports about how well one particular country, or one
particular incinerator, has done with limiting dioxin emissions, has been used
to promote the building of incinerators in other countries, where the operators
are neither as conscientious nor the regulators as competent.
For
example, long after Swedish consultants and scientists had told the world that
Sweden had solved the dioxin emission problem (about 1986), incinerators were
built and operated in the US which had extremely high dioxin emissions.
For
example a 2000 ton per day trash incinerator built in Norfolk, Virginia in
1988, was found in 1994, to be putting out more dioxin (approximately 2000
grams of toxic equivalents per year) than the combined emissions from all of
the traffic, incinerators, industry and all other sources in Sweden, Germany
and the Netherlands added together.
The
attention being paid to end-of-the-pipe dioxin control on incinerators will not
solve the dioxin contamination of the environment. Whether one accepts the need
for trash incineration or not, one has to applaud the efforts and success of
those who have reduced dioxin emissions from these facilities. However, this
effort cannot solve the dioxin problem generated by municipal waste. As long as
chlorinated plastics like poly vinyl chloride (PVC) and poly vinylidine
dichloride (PVDC) are present in the waste stream, dioxins and furans are going
to be generated in every back yard burner, landfill fire, roadside burning and
accidental fires in homes, businesses and industry.
The
reduction of dioxin emissions in northern incinerators should not make us
complacent about the potential dioxin contamination from the building of inferior
quality incinerators in southern countries and the continued contamination from
the casual and accidental burning of trash in both north and south. In my view,
the dioxin problem can only be solved by phasing out the use of chlorinated
plastics and the industrial use of chlorine.
The
incineration industry has had to develop on the fly. New scientific and
environmental findings trigger new pollution control devices and expensive
retrofits. Incinerators are built and financed with the expectation that they
will operate at least 20 years. However, incinerators operating today look very
different from those built 20 years ago. We can anticipate that those operating
20 years from now will look very different from today’s. The trouble with making changes on the fly,
is that a solution to one pollutant problem, may make other pollutant problems
worse.
For
example, the demand for higher furnace temperatures and better combustion to
combat the dioxin problem, led to higher nitric oxide formation, the greater
liberation of toxic metals, and reduced mercury control (less soot available
for mercury absorption). Both the desire to capture energy via water boilers
and the use of electrostatic precipitators for particulate control, increased
the post combustion formation of dioxin.
The use of lime and baghouse scrubbing combinations has led to a more
toxic fly ash product. The public has had to live through this ongoing
experiment for many years, and continues to do so.
For
example, in 1993, the citizens of Columbus, Ohio, who were aroused by anecdotal
reports of an increase in rare neurological symptoms and other illnesses,
including cancer, in the vicinity of a 2000 ton per day incinerator, discovered
that measurements made at the facility in 1992, but not reported to the public,
indicated that nearly 1000 grams of dioxin TEQs were being emitted from the
facility annually. This was more than the total dioxin generated in the whole
of Germany at that time. The citizens received two further shocks. First,
scientists from the US EPA reported at Dioxin ‘93, that the total quantity of
dioxin emitted from all the US trash incinerators combined (about 130 at that
time) was between 60 and 200 grams of dioxin TEQs (24), which was less than the
single Columbus incinerator by itself. Second, the Ohio Health department
reported that a 1000 grams of dioxin (about one half of a Seveso accident)
falling annually on their heads and surrounding areas posed no health
problems. 1.6.1.UK.
In
the UK, officials have had to admit that their trash incinerators operating in
the ‘70s, ‘80s and even into the early ‘90s, could not meet new European dioxin
standards without major retrofits, and that these “old” incinerators had been
responsible for putting most of the dioxin into the UK environment, including
cows’ milk. We have already noted that both the range and the average dioxin
level in cows’ milk in the UK (i.e. background levels) is much higher than the
truer “background” levels in Ireland.
Instead of issuing a massive apology for permitting this pollution of
the food supply, the UK is currently proposing to build more incinerators as
part of their “alternative” energy program.
Introduction.
There
are two kinds of ash generated by an incinerator: the bottom ash which
falls
through the grate system in the furnace (about 90% of the ash), and
the
fly ash, which is the very fine material which is collected in the
boilers,
the heat exchangers and the air pollution control devices. As far
as
toxic metals are concerned, it is a chemical truism to state that the
better
the air pollution control the more toxic the fly ash becomes
In
some jurisdictions like Ontario, Canada and Germany, the fly ash is assumed to
be a highly toxic material and is automatically sent to hazardous waste
containment facilities. In Japan, current regulations will probably force the
vitrification of the fly ash. However, in other jurisdictions the toxicity of
the fly ash (particularly) is obscured by three things: a) the mixing of the
fly ash with the bottom ash before testing and disposal, b) not testing for the
absolute levels of toxics like metals and dioxins in the ash, but rather only
looking at what dissolves out of the ash during a leachate test and c) the
interference of the lime present in the ash with some of these leaching tests.
All three of these machinations particularly pertain in the US. Because of this
situation, in my view, neither workers nor members of the public have been
fully warned of the dangers of being directly exposed to this ash.
Further,
in some jurisdictions the ash is being handled and disposed of in a cavalier
fashion, which while it may save the operators money, is highly unsatisfactory
from an environmental point of view. For example, in the Netherlands, as of
1994, 35% of the fly ash was going into asphalt. In the US combined ash has
gone directly to municipal landfills and mixed with trash containing organic
material. In many instances it is used for landfill cover. Elsewhere, the fly
ash has been used to make concrete, with no warning on the product label that
it contains toxic metals or dioxins.
If
handled properly, ash makes incineration prohibitively expensive, for all but
the wealthiest communities. If handled improperly, it poses both short and long
term health and environmental dangers.
At
the time the small incinerator proposal (200 tons per day) was defeated in our
county in Northern NY (St. Lawrence County), in 1990, the capital costs had
risen to $34 million. The investment firm Moodys had estimated that the tipping
fee (the cost to consumers of delivering one ton of trash to the facility)
would be a staggering $180 per ton. Such tipping fees have essentially
eliminated facilities in the US much smaller than 750 tons per day. In 1983, a
1500 ton per day facility built in North Andover, with only a three field
electrostatic precipitator for air pollution control, cost about $190 million.
The
current tipping fee is $95 per ton, but could rise as high as $200 per ton in
order to pay for new air pollution control. A 1000 ton per day facility which
went on line in 1994 in Syracuse, NY, and fitted with state-of- the-art air
pollution control, cost $178 million. A 2000 ton per day facility, which went
on line near Amsterdam in the Netherlands in 1995, cost a massive $600 million
with half the investment going into air pollution control. Tipping fees
reported from some German incinerators are staggering.
Most
of the money spent on these incinerators is going into complicated equipment.
Apart from the number of jobs created in the building of the plant, very few
permanent jobs are forthcoming. A large incinerator may employ about 100
workers. On the other hand, if the community puts its efforts into source
separation, reuse and repair, recycling and composting, a very large number of
jobs are created, both in the actual handling of the waste and in the secondary
industries which utilise the recovered material.
The
huge engineering firms that build incinerators are seldom located in the host
community and thus most of the money invested leaves the community (and the
country if the company is foreign based). 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.
Developing
economies, can ill afford to lose capital and local job opportunities. In 1997,
authorities in the Philippines were considering three large trash incinerators
for the Manila area (and as many as 7 others outside Manila). The Danish
company Volund is offering to build a 1300 ton per day facility at the old, and
infamous, Smoky Mountain dump, to burn excavated plastics from the old landfill
there.
The
American company, Ogden Martin is being considered to build a 2000 ton per day
facility at the Carmona landfill, just outside Manila, and the Swiss Swedish
conglomerate Asea Brown and Boveri (ABB) is part of a proposal to build a 4500
ton per day facility (which would be the largest in the world) at the San Mateo
landfill.
It
is extremely frustrating to witness the potential squandering of huge amounts
of taxpayers’ money on these capital intensive facilities, while the largely
voluntary and local efforts to develop recycling and composting programs in the
Barangays (small political jurisdictions within the city) wither for lack of
financial and governmental support. These truths are often concealed from
taxpayers, because the incinerator projects are frequently promoted as being
“privately financed”. This coupled with the PR hype of “waste-to-energy” tricks
many into believing that the public will not be paying for these facilities,
when in fact, apart from a relatively minor return from energy sales (discussed
below) the bulk of the repayment on the investment (plus profits) has to come
from the tipping fee which comes out of the public exchequer.
In
order to pay back the massive investment involved in building an incinerator,
the builder usually has to secure contracts which commit communities to deliver
their trash to the facility for an extended period of time. The latter have to
sign a so-called “put-or-pay” agreement.
These
commit the communities to deliver a prescribed amount of trash to the
incinerator each month or year, at a fixed rate, and should they fail to do so
they have to pay the scheduled amount anyway.
3.5.1 Flow control outlawed in the US.
In
the US, the Supreme Court threw a monkey wrench into this system when it ruled
that these kind of “flow control” measures as applied to waste haulers were
unconstitutional, claiming that they interfered with “inter-state commerce”. In
short, waste haulers are now allowed to take the waste where they choose. This
means that in many states, trash haulers are taking the waste to distant
landfills where the tipping fee is much cheaper.
For
example, in 1998, the spot market price for getting rid of trash in
Massachusetts is about $45 a ton, which means that facilities like the North
Andover incinerator, charging $95 a ton tipping fee, are in serious financial
trouble. In New Jersey, political leaders are in a turmoil trying to work out
how to finance the remaining $1.6 billion debt on the five incinerators that
have been built there (at one point NJ wanted to build 22 incinerators!) (29).
Again, each incinerator is not receiving the amount of waste (and hence income)
anticipated.
The
current debate is over who should pay off these debts: the county operating the
incinerator, the counties using the incinerator or the state as a whole.
The
modern trash incinerator can be used to generate hot water, steam and/or
electricity. Trash in industrialised countries contains enough paper and
plastic for it to burn without the need of any (or much) auxiliary fuel. As few
communities recover energy from the waste dumped into landfills, this energy
recovery represents a net energy gain to the local community.
Long
term contracts for the sale of steam to local companies, or state facilities,
like prisons, can sometimes be secured or the sale of electricity to power
utilities can be negotiated. In some cases state or national governments
require the utilities to purchase the energy from incinerators. In the UK, the
government even offers subsidies to trash incineration under its Non-Fossil
Fuel Obligation (NFFO) incentive scheme to promote alternatives to fossil fuels
for power generation.
While,
the claim that the modern trash incinerator is a “waste-to-energy” facility
makes for good public relations, the reality is that they produce very little
energy and energy production certainly doesn’t justify the huge costs involved
in building them. For example, the 1500 ton per day facility built in North
Andover (Massachusetts) at a cost of $190 million, receives trash from about
half a million people, but only provides enough electricity to power 28,000
homes.
All
of Japan’s 193 waste-to-energy incinerators combined produce less energy than
one nuclear power station and if the United States burned all its municipal
waste it would contribute less than 1% of the country’s energy needs.
1) A trash incinerator is the only kind of power
station which gets paid to accept the fuel it burns.
2) The costs of generating electricity increases
significantly, as the fuel gets dirtier and trash is the dirtiest fuel burned
in any “power station”. Enormous
amounts of money have to go into air pollution control and ash disposal, if
these are done properly.
3) A trash incinerator has to run for several
years before there is a net production of energy. Large quantities of energy
have to go into building; operating, maintaining and dismantling it after its
life is over.
4) The economics of paying for the building and
running of an incinerator revolve around the tipping fee paid by communities to
use the facility. The income from electricity sales is a minor contributor. For
example a facility I visited in Poggibonzi, Italy, in 1998, was receiving 10
times more money from tipping fees than they were obtaining from the sale of
electricity.
The
most telling argument against the waste-to-energy promotion comes from two
studies performed in the US which 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 compared to
that produced from it being burned. The reason for this big difference is that
incineration can only recover the some of the calorific value contained in the
trash. It cannot recover any of the energy invested in the extraction,
processing, fabrication and chemical synthesis involved in the manufacture of
the objects and materials in the waste stream. Reuse and recycling can.
From
a national or global perspective, an incinerator is a “waste-of-energy”
facility not a “waste-to-energy” facility. Unfortunately, this is often lost on
the local decision-maker, who sees a net local production of energy compared to
land filling.
A
larger vision is needed to see the loss of energy that incineration represents.
Simply put, every time a local community burns something the larger community
has to replace it with all the huge energy costs of primary processing and
fabrication. It is only reuse; recycling and composting that allows us to
partially reduce the energy (and pollution) costs of primary processing and
fabrication.
Since
1985, in the US, over 300 trash incinerators, have been defeated or put on
hold.
In
1985, California had plans for 35 incinerators, only 3 were built, the rest
were cancelled. In 1985, New Jersey had plans for 22 trash incinerators, only 5
have been built. A sixth planned for Mercer County was finally defeated after
many years of struggle, in November 1996. Since 1994, more incinerators have
been closed down than those that have gone on line.
As
of this writing (October 1998) there is not one active proposal to build a
trash incinerator of any significant size (i.e. above 40 tons per day) in the
US. The last proposal considered was one by Foster Wheeler in the town of
Pennsville, NJ. Not only did the County Commissioners reject this proposal, but
Foster Wheeler has announced since this defeat and a humiliating debacle with
the fluidised bed incinerator which it built in Robbins, Illinois, that it is
getting out of the Waste- to-energy incineration business in the US (35). Several other large engineering firms
have pulled out of the incinerator business in the US, including Combustion
Engineering, Blount, Dravo, Westinghouse, General Electric and Ebasco.
This
leaves only three major players: Ogden Martin, Wheelabrator and American
Refuel. Two of these are owned by major waste companies (WMI and BFI) which can
cover their loss on the incinerator front with developments in other areas of
their waste business.
It
isn’t just the US where incineration has proved so unpopular. There has been
strong opposition to new incinerator proposals in Australia, Belgium, Canada,
France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Spain, the
UK and many other countries, both in the North and in the South. There is not enough time to go into much
detail here, but three countries provide particularly interesting examples.
Germany
is considered by many to build, operate and regulate their incinerators better
than any other country, and yet the opposition to the building of new
incinerators there since the late ‘80s has been intense. For example, a
citizens’ coalition called “Das Bessere Mullkoncept”(the Better Garbage
Concept) in 1990, was able to get a referendum on the ballot in Bavaria which
would have virtually eliminated trash incineration as a waste option. At that
time the Bavarian government was planning 17 new incinerators.
The
coalition was able to get over one million people to go to their town halls, in
a 12 day period, to sign a lengthy petition in support of getting this
referendum on the ballot. Even though the referendum was narrowly defeated,
this was an amazing achievement and an indication of the massive unpopularity
of incineration in this state.
Many
of us in the environmental movement had given up on France as far as
challenging incineration was concerned. Any country that can go half way around
the globe and explode atomic bombs in someone else’s backyard is hardly
amenable to environmental or ethical arguments.
However,
in the last few years a grass roots movement against incineration has emerged
in France which is second to none. The National Coalition Against the
Importation, Exportation and Incineration of Waste, has over 100 communities as
members, has already stopped several incinerators, and has generated more press
coverage on dioxin and the contamination of the food chain than any other
country in the world.
When
citizens in Khulna (a port in the Bay of Bengal) heard about a proposal by an
American company to build a power station in their town, they were excited.
When however, the Bangladesh Environmental Law Association investigated the
matter, they found that the actual proposal was a huge trash incineration plant
which would burn trash shipped in from New York City. They were far from
impressed and organised, successfully, to stop the project. So, even in
countries, which are economically depressed, citizens are capable of seeing
through the “waste-to-energy” promotion hype, if there is some individual or
group prepared to do some homework.
Too
often decision-makers make the decision to build an incinerator before they
have consulted with the public in a meaningful way. They usually rely on large
consulting companies to review their options. Because such companies draw much
of their expertise from an engineering background, they have a natural tendency
towards the high-tech solution and give little credence to solutions in which
organisation and education must play a dominant role. PR firms are used to
devise strategies which attempt to negate the public’s “irritating” opposition.
However, treating the public in this way usually proves disastrous. What is
billed, as a “quick-fix” solution isn’t quick, if the public organises to
oppose it?
Even
if decision-makers believe that incineration will be a part of their waste
solution, they would be advised to put serious attention and equal funding
(with a careful choice of consultants) into an alternative plan that doesn’t
include incineration. This way they can avoid the trap of coming to the public
with a proposal which essentially says, “accept our incinerator or opt for
chaos”.
Politically
it does not make sense to lead with the most problematic, most expensive and
most contentious alternative to landfilling. It makes more sense to lead with
those alternatives which are least contentious, namely reuse, recycling and
composting. Only when these have been maximised, should incinerators or other
destructive technologies be considered.
In
sharp contrast to incineration, recycling and composting are far more popular
with the general public. In the US, more people recycle than vote! Despite pessimistic predictions by waste
experts in the mid- ‘80s, the American people have emphatically embraced
recycling. Currently, there are nearly 9000 curbside recycling programs, and
over 3000 yard waste composting programs in operation in the US (37).
Seattle,
a city of one million people is close to a 50% diversion from landfill. The
state of NJ, as a whole, has achieved a 45% diversion rate, with some
individual communities exceeding 60%. Communities in the Quinte region of
Ontario, Canada have achieved over 70% diversion from landfill. Small
communities near Milan, Italy have also achieved diversion rates of over 70%,
and two communities near Padua are at 80% and above.
This
presentation is already far too long for me to spend much time discussing the
details of non-burn alternatives. There are, however, a few points that can be
made which throw more light on the incineration debate.
It
is clear that no solution to waste will get rid of landfills, at least for the
foreseeable future. The question then becomes what kind of landfill can your
community live with. A raw waste landfill? A landfill that receives the ash,
bulky waste and other material by-passed from the incinerator? A residue
landfill after an intensive source separation, reduction, reuse, recycling,
toxic removal and composting program? Put like that, most people would probably
opt for third option, assuming that they had confidence in the quality of the
program.
But
we can make such a landfill even better, if we insist that it be preceded by a
screening facility to ensure that only non-toxic and non-biodegradable material
is buried.
Unfortunately,
such a “front end” approach seems to be out of step with most regulatory
authorities which endorse a “back end” approach. Their approach consists of
lining systems, leachate collection, leachate treatment, daily cover, final
cover and capping as the way of protecting the environment from dumping things
into a hole in the ground. Because of the economy of scale, this approach of
“controlling what comes out” tends to drive the building of regional mega- landfills.
These excite intense opposition from host communities, and usually have to be
pushed through undemocratically. The alternative approach of “controlling what
goes in”, means that we can return to small, more politically acceptable,
community controlled landfills.
While
most people often describe the alternative to landfilling and incineration as
“recycling”, in my view, the most important component of the alternative
strategy, after the critical first step of source separation (discussed below),
is “composting”. This is because the material which causes most of the problems
in landfills is organic (biodegradable) waste.
This otherwise relatively benign material once it gets into a landfill
creates methane, which contributes to global warming, doors, and an acid
leachate, which in turn can move toxins into the surface or ground water. Composting, at a far lower environmental and
economic cost than incineration, can keep this organic material out of
landfills.
Undoubtedly,
one of the responses to this presentation from incinerator advocates will be,
“We agree with you about the necessity to maximise reduction, reuse and
recycling (they often forget to include composting on this list), but you are
still going to have some stuff left over, doesn’t it make sense to burn this
material and recover its energy content rather than to dump it in a landfill?”
This argument goes by the name “integrated waste management”. It sounds good,
but it seldom yields what it promises.
Once
a community embarks on building an incinerator, it soaks up all the available
cash; little is left over for a really aggressive recycling and composting
program. Moreover, once the incinerator is built it will need all the waste it
can get (which in the US often includes non-municipal waste) in order to pay
off the massive loans needed to build it. In essence, once built you have to
maximise the use of an incinerator. It
is inflexible: other new options will be resisted.
On
the other hand, if one backs up the reuse, recycling and composting program
with an expensive landfill (or the temporary export of waste to a distant
landfill) one can minimise its use without penalty. Ideally, decision makers should strive to design a program where
increased waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting, visibly saves the
community money from avoided landfill tipping fees. In this way one will have
“integrated” the environmental solution with the economic solution.
Left
to highly paid consulting firms, municipal waste can become an extremely
complicated business. Certainly, incineration done properly is a very
complicated process. However, if we look at the “waste” in our homes it is a
relatively simple material. In essence, its most of the material we paid good
money for yesterday and we don’t want today. Waste is made by mixing all this
material together. It can be unmade with source separation. This is the vital first step in solving the
waste crisis.
With
source separation we can get reusable objects, materials that can be recycled
back to industry, materials that can be composted (preferably in our
backyards), some household toxins and an educated household. With
manufacturers, and especially the packaging industry, producing ever more
complicated mixtures of materials, some objects once separated still pose
problems. However, rather than allowing these poorly designed materials drive
the building of expensive incinerators, these “left over” materials should drive
research into better industrial design. In my view, the five principles, or
imperatives, we need to apply in order to solve the waste crisis in an
environmentally sound and economically cost effective manner, are:
1. Keep the solution simple.
2. Keep the solution local.
3. Integrate the solution with the local
economy.
4. Integrate the solution with local community
development.
5. Make sure the solution is sustainable.
7. Sustainability
I
argue that the fragile biosphere of our planet is threatened because the
industrialised nations have imposed, at an ever-increasing pace, a linear
system of handling materials, onto a biological system which handles materials
in a circular fashion. Our linear approach is not sustainable on a finite
planet. However, its non-sustainability has been hidden from us for over 200
years by an apparent “abundant” supply of fossil fuel. The end result is the
conversion of material resources to waste, at an ever-increasing rate.
Even
world famous economists have rationalised a system which lives off capital
rather than income. The use of incineration fails to challenge this linear
system.
Every
time we burn something in an incinerator, or dump it in a landfill, we have to
replace it. This means going back to all the high energy inputs, resource
depletion and pollution of primary processing. It is precisely the enormous
growth in primary processing that is giving us global warming.
In
other words, it is overconsumption that is giving us both the local trash
crises and the global crisis. It is only by reusing, recycling and reducing
consumption that we can do anything about either. The trash bag or can is the
most concrete connection each individual has with the global crisis.
At
the national level the fires of overconsumption are further stoked by economies
which measure their success in the global economy by their annual growth of
their GNP and not the welfare of their citizens or the quality of the
environment which they plunder. By and large, the individual has been seduced
with an elaborate web of false needs woven by a very sophisticated advertising
industry, harboured by an equally alluring and distracting host medium called
television.
As
long as the prevailing western (largely post- war American) philosophy - the
more we consume the happier we will become - threatens to rule the world, as a
species we are doomed. Our salvation rests on those who can show that they have
become happier while consuming far less. As Gandhi so elegantly put it, “the
world has enough for every one’s need but not enough for every one’s greed.”
We
need to find the strength to put human relations and community building at the
centre of our lives, instead of the TV set. Educating our citizens to reduce,
reuse, recycle and compost is not a total solution but it is a fine beginning.
On the other hand, every trash incinerator built delays this discussion and
squanders the opportunity to move our communities and our species in the right
direction to fight overconsumption and the global warming it spawns.
8. Conclusion
In the above presentation I have presented the arguments which
support my conclusion that incineration is not an appropriate waste management
solution in the twenty first century. Fortunately, the public’s fears about the
pollutants released and those captured in the residues, as well as
incineration’s enormous economic costs, when made visible, have dramatically
slowed down the building of these facilities in both northern and southern
countries alike. If one avoids the beguiling but inaccurate label
“waste-to-energy” one can see that these facilities do not belong in a future
in which sustainability will become the key issue for survival. In my view,
when you build an incinerator in your community you are advertising to the
world that you were not clever enough, either politically or technically, to recover
your discarded resources in a manner which is responsible to your local
community or future generations.