Incineration – Solid Waste Disposal

by VOA News

Environmental protests have replaced land grabs as the main source of unrest in parts of the country, according to Chinese officials.

Grassroots campaigners in China are increasingly using official channels to push for more transparency when it comes to the environment.

Thomas Johnson, a researcher specializing in Chinese environmental policy at the City University of Hong Kong, says one example of this ongoing struggle is a waste incinerator near the coastal city of Qinhuangdao, in China’s northern province of Hebei.

“This incinerator was half-built before it was halted by the government after opposition from the local people,” Johnson said. “I went there last year and you can see in the middle of the field there is this half-finished incinerator, with a couple of guards watching it and growing vegetables within the compound.”

As a growing number of residents and nongovernmental organizations question the environmental impact of large-scale projects, such starts and stops are becoming more common.

Waste incineration has long been a controversial issue in many countries, with opponents focusing on pollution’s impact on public health.

How much dioxin

China’s limits on pollution by industrial plants are weaker than those of many other nations, and incinerators can release 10 times as much dioxin as similar plants in the European Union. Dioxin and related compounds are highly toxic and are linked to cancer and birth defects in people exposed to high levels of contamination.

China already generates one-quarter of the world’s total waste, and that amount increases by eight percent every year.

City governments are under great pressure to solve their mounting trash problems, and incineration is an increasingly popular choice. The central government aims to have 300 trash-burning plants in operation by 2015 – twice as many as now. But opposition from local communities has halted work on many plants, at least temporarily.

“Even if they encounter opposition, it is unlikely that local governments or construction companies will say clearly that they will not build the incinerators,” said Mao Da, a researcher at Beijing Normal University who studies solid-waste treatment techniques. “Between the developers’ attitude and citizens’ persistent opposition, we sometimes realize that the chance of completing some of these plants is very low.”

Mao says the Chinese public does not trust the government to enforce technology and safety standards for incinerators, and there is growing concern about the potentially grave risk posed by increasing airborne concentrations of dioxin and other poisons.

Gas-mask protests

Opposition to incinerators takes various forms. In Guanxi, signs deploring “smelly” conditions hang from high-rise apartment windows while protesters in Guangzhou ride the subway wearing gas masks.

Apart from environmental concerns, Johnson says government agencies’ lack of coordination also is a source of trouble.

“One part of the government approves an incinerator in a certain place,” Johnson said, “and another part says, ‘Let’s develop this area for middle-class housing.’”

By the time people move into their new homes, Johnson says, too often they discover an incinerator will soon be built nearby.

“In some cases, the house has been marketed to them as being in a very ‘green‘ area – clean air – and they are suddenly very upset that they found this incinerator at their doorstep.”

Chinese law mandates that authorities study an incinerator’s impact before it is built. Guidelines for placement of waste-treatment plants must be observed, and there must be consultation with people living near the site.

Bending the rules?

However, NGOs say environmental departments often bend the rules.

In the case of the half-built Qinhuangdao waste incinerator, the impact assessment reported that 100 people were surveyed, and there was unanimous agreement on the project.

Members of the group Friends of Nature checked with the residents named in the official survey, however, and found that none of them had ever heard about the questionnaire.

Waste processors and government officials charged with protecting the environment also have recently come under scrutiny for their reluctance to disclose emissions data.

The environmental group Wuhu Ecology Center asked 122 plants that burn trash to provide information about pollution discharges more than two years ago. As of last month, there was no response from a majority of the plants.

“What we asked for is information that they are bound by law to make public, and yet they have not complied so far,” said Ding Jie, a volunteer at the Wuhu Ecology Center.

She says such unwillingness to disclose information is harming the public, which should be aware of the health risks for those who live near incinerators.

As consumer consumption rises in urban areas and more goods and garbage pile up, most observers agree that solving China’s trash problem will not be easy. But many believe that transparency could go a long way toward easing popular opposition to incinerators, and help restore the public’s trust in government.

http://www.voanews.com/content/chinese-incinerators-spark-public-protests/1664402.html

http://ideaireland.org/library/incinerators-and-their-health-effects/

Irish Doctors’ Environmental Association

Incinerators and their Health Effects

Incinerators and their Health Effects

June 2006-06-15

Incineration is a topical subject in Ireland as our government presses ahead with plans to build various incinerators around the Irish countryside to deal with our waste problem. History has demonstrated that it may take decades to identify the health effects of procedures that produce more chemicals into our environment. Time and again, early warning signs have often gone unheeded and proven to be far more important than we realized at the time. Aside from the well-known premature assurance given regarding the use of toxic pesticides such as DDT in the past, it was also unexpected to find that a major source of dioxin contamination of food supplies was due to the older generation of incinerators in the UK. For these reasons, the British Society for Ecological Medicine has recently published a report on the health effects of waste incinerators. They explain in their introduction that the purpose of their report is “to look at all the evidence and come to a balanced view about the future dangers that would be associated with the next generation of waste incinerators”.

Incineration does not solve the problem of waste, it only reduces waste to approximately 30 – 50 % of the original compressed waste mass, and this is converted into an ash that contains some of the most toxic concentrations of substances, such as dioxins and heavy metals. The generation and safe disposal of this toxic waste is very problematic as pollutants from landfill sites have been known to seep out, polluting local water sources, and once they contaminate the water table, their removal is considered to be almost impossible. The EU Commission have stated that this may be one of the most important sources of dioxins in the future. Accidents are also a possibility when moving toxic ash on lengthy road journeys to special landfill sites.

Incinerators release hundreds of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere when the waste is burned. Little is known about the risks of many of these toxic chemicals, particularly when they are combined. The exact composition of the emissions from incinerators is variable depending upon the waste being burnt, the efficiency of the incinerator and the pollution control measure available. As the chemical nature of our waste is changing, the potential for adverse health effects from incineration emissions are very difficult to assess. In terms of health effects, some of the most important constituents of emissions are considered to be particulates, heavy metals and combustion products of man-made chemicals.

Particulates, or particulate matter (PM) is a complex mixture of organic and inorganic particles that can be solid, liquid or both, suspended in the air. There is a large, and increasing body of research highlighting the health dangers of particulates found in incinerator emissions. Research done in 2004 by the WHO European Centre for Environment and Health, Bonn found that:

• PM increases the risk of respiratory death in infants under 1 year, affects the rate of lung function development, aggravates asthma and causes other respiratory symptoms such as cough and bronchitis in children;
• PM2.5 seriously affects health, increasing deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and lung cancer. Increased PM2.5 concentrations increase the risk of emergency hospital admissions for cardiovascular and respiratory causes; and
• PM10 affects respiratory morbidity, as indicated by hospital admissions for respiratory illness (WHO fact sheet, 2005; 2).

In terms of heavy metals, several of the metals found in the emissions and ash produced by incinerators are known or suspected carcinogens. These toxins accumulate in the body over time. In children they have been implicated in childhood problems including autism, dyslexia, allergies, impulsive behaviour attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well as learning difficulties, lowered intelligence and delinquency. Exposed adults have demonstrated higher levels of violence, dementia and depression than in non-exposed adults. They have also been implicated in Parkinson’s disease. Inhalation of some of them, such as nickel, beryllium, chromium, cadmium and arsenic, is found to increase the risk of lung cancer. Mercury, one of the most dangerous heavy metals, is neurotoxic and implicated in learning disabilities, hyperactivity as well as Alzheimer’s Disease.

The report also found that a large number of the toxins emitted by incinerators can cause damage to the immune system. It is now thought that the synergistic effect of the combination of various toxins is likely to have an even more potent and damaging effect on immunity than any pollutant in isolation. Most of these chemicals are fat-soluble and accumulate in the fatty organs and tissue. They are particularly dangerous to the unborn child because many of these toxins are actively transmitted to the foetus across the mother’s placenta, for the body mistakes heavy metals for essential minerals. Until very late in the pregnancy, the only fatty tissues that the foetus has, is its nervous system and particularly the brain, so it is there that they accumulate.

The National Research Council was established to advise the US government on the extent of population that would be exposed to health hazards by an incinerator. They concluded that,

Persistent air pollutants, such as dioxins, furans and mercury can be dispersed over large regions – well beyond local areas and even the countries from which the sources emanate. Food contaminated by an incinerator facility might be consumed by local people close to the facility or far away from it. Thus, local deposition on food might result in some exposure of populations at great distances, due to transport of food to markets. However, distant populations are likely to be more exposed through long-range transport of pollutants and low-level widespread deposition on food crops at locations remote from an incineration facility (B.S.E.M.report,2005;34).

When looking at the updated incinerators that cause less air pollution, they found that they cause more toxic ash, which is easily wind-borne. It is of critical importance, that there is still no adequate method for disposing with this toxic fly ash and that it has a record of being poorly regulated.

The evaluated cost of incineration is enormous, not just in the waste disposal costs, which are very high, but also in health and environmental damage, which can cost countries billions to address. It was exactly for these types of situations that the Precautionary Principle was introduced into national and international law. A recent review of health effects of incinerators found a positive exposure-disease association with cancer and congenital malformations. It would therefore seem that from the evidence presented in this report, that building municipal waste incinerations not only contravenes the Precautionary Principle but possibly, European law.

Finally, the authors of the report note that,

Taking into account these results and the difficulty in identifying causes of cancers and other chronic diseases, it is a matter of considerable concern that incinerators have been introduced without a comprehensive system to study their health effects and that further incinerators are being planned without comprehensive monitoring either of emission or of the health of the local population. (B.S.E.M. report, 2005; 21)

As Professor C. V. Howard from the Centre for Molecular Biosciences, University of Ulster, concluded in his foreword on the report,

Incineration destroys accountability and this encourages industries to go on making products that lead to problematic toxic wastes. Once the waste has been reduced to ash who can say who made what? The past 150 years has seen a progressive “toxification” of the waste stream with heavy metals, radionuclides and synthetic halogenated organic molecules. It is time to start reversing that trend. We won’t achieve that while we continue to incinerate waste.

Juliet Duff,
Irish Doctors’ Environmental Association (IDEA)

References:

British Society for Ecological Medicine Report (2005) The Health Effects of Waste Incinerators can be downloaded from the website:www.ecomed.org.uk/pub_waste.php

WHO, EUROPE, fact sheet euro (04/2005) Berlin, Copenhagen, Rome, Particulate matter air pollution: how it harms health, can be downloaded on:www.euro.who.int/document/mediacentre/fs0405e.pdf

UKWIN maintains an interactive map and a table of existing, potential and prevented municipal waste incinerators, as well as an archive of annual incinerator performance reports and case studies

This section brings together a broad range of information related to incineration and to wider waste matters. Please feel free to use this information to help inform your own anti-incineration campaigns. You are welcome to reproduce, adapt and share this information.

Material produced as part of the UKWIN Campaign Guide series to support local campaigners.

This section contains resources that can be directly used in your campaigns. Over time this section will include posters, leaflets and templates.

This section of the UKWIN website provides an archive of useful documents that can be used either as they are or to inform new documents such as planning objections.

Consultations submissions include responses to waste strategies and Government consultations.

Download PDF : Environmental Conference – Incinerator – 5 June 2013