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Incineration – Solid Waste Disposal

RFA: Ten Detained, Two Injured in Guangdong Clashes Over Planned Waste Plant

Dec 12th, 2013
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from Luisetta Mudie, writing for Radio Free Asia:

Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong have detained at least 10 people amid clashes between riot police and protesters angry over plans to built a waste incinerator plant near their homes, residents said on Thursday.

“They detained 10 people, and some of them were injured,” a resident of Xinlian village near Guangdong’s Meizhou city said of Wednesday’s clashes.

“A lot of riot police … and special police came, maybe [350] or more,” said the resident, who gave only his surname Zhu.

“That’s when the clashes happened, and two villagers were injured, including an old lady who was taken to hospital with broken ribs,” he said. “She was in her sixties.”

Zhu said the local farming community was furious that the local government had appropriated more than 100 mu (16 acres) of rice paddy on the pretext of building a new highway, but that when construction work began, workers told the villagers they were building a waste incinerator on their doorstep.

A delegation was sent to confront the village party secretary, but was turned away without a meeting, he added.

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SCMP Letters: Decision on incinerator technology driven by vested interests

Dec 2nd, 2013
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From Tom Yau, Lantau Island resident:

Environmental Protection Department assistant director Elvis Au’s claim (“Why Shek Kwu Chau incinerator is still the best option [1]”, November 5) obscures the fact that the decision on incinerator technology was driven by vested interests, and the decision on the incinerator’s location by political pressure. Neither decision is “the best option” for Hong Kong.

The department has fixated on building a moving-grate incinerator since Edward Yau Tang-wah became environment secretary in July 2007. Au refuses to acknowledge the advances in incinerator technology over the past six years, ignoring the decreasing installation of moving-grate incinerators worldwide and the increasing use of plasma gasification for municipal solid waste. Nor has Au addressed the growing evidence on the health hazards of the older technology.

In 2009, before any decision was made on incinerator technology, the department engaged Aecom to hold “public consultations” making the case for a moving-grate incinerator. In November 2011, the department appointed Aecom the prime contractor for the project; this was before it sought approval from the Legislative Council’s environment panel in April 2012. The intersection of Aecom’s interest in a sunset technology and the department’s predisposition to this technology was evident from early in Yau’s tenure.

On the choice of location, the department clearly yielded to political pressure. Reports by its two consultants, Camp, Dresser & McKee International and Aecom, show Tsang Tsui in Tuen Mun as the better location under five criteria: engineering, technical, economic, less ecological impact and more efficient land use. One factor favours Shek Kwu Chau: lower transportation cost.

Constructing an incinerator in Tsang Tsui would cost 26 per cent less than in Shek Kwu Chau (September 2011 prices reported by Au in 2012) and be completed two years earlier. Reclamation, seabed dredging and cable laying to create the Shek Kwu Chau infrastructure will have an impact on fisheries and wildlife habitats. The Tsang Tsui site is ready in situ amid existing waste-treatment facilities.

However, Tuen Mun district councillor Lau Wong-fat was reported in January 2008 as saying Tuen Mun already has a power plant and landfill, hence the government should pick another site for the incinerator. Since then, the department has promoted Shek Kwu Chau, introducing the specious criterion of “balanced spatial distribution” of waste treatment facilities.

The choice of incinerator technology and its location will affect Hong Kong far into the future. It should not be driven by vested interests and political pressure.

12 Nov 2013

Impact from Typhoon Haiyan should prompt rethink on HK incinerator proposals

Dec 1st, 2013
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Hong Kong officials are still pressing to build an incinerator on the offshore island of Shek Kwu Chau, along with ash lagoons to deposit the (highly toxic) residual ash that the incinerator will produce. The devastation in the Philippines, from the recent ‘super typhoon’, should, however, prompt some rethink about the potential disaster if a typhoon of this magnitude should make direct landfall in Hong Kong. From an SCMP report on the aftermath of the typhoon:

Haiyan generated storm surges that saw waves three metres high swamp coastal towns and race inland.”The last time I saw something of this scale was in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami,” said Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, head of the UN Disaster Assessment Co-ordination Team sent to Tacloban, referring to the 2004 earthquake and tsunami.

Huge waves brought about by powerful typhoon Haiyan hit the shoreline in Legazpi city. (AP/Nelson Salting)

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Euractiv: Incineration causes more problems than it solves

Dec 1st, 2013
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An interview with Ariadna Rodrigo, Resource Use Campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe, published on Euractiv:

Touted by some as a two-fold solution to the EU’s energy and waste problems, incineration is not the answer the EU looking for as it debates changes to its waste and landfill rules, argues Ariadna Rodrigo.

There have been reports that incineration, the practice of burning waste, is inhibiting the development of recycling. Is this the case in the EU?

Yes, unfortunately this is the case. Incinerators come with a 20 or 30 year contract – a period in which municipalities are locked in to provide waste. This means municipalities have very little incentive to reduce, reuse or recycle waste. Europe already has too many incinerators and plans to build more will further hinder our chances of improving our waste management.

The price of materials has risen by 150% over the past ten years and it is estimated that we are throwing away over 5 billion euros annually. Our waste is wealth.

However, our policies allow these valuable materials to escape the economic cycle by being burned or buried. According to the latest Eurostat figures, we still landfill and incinerate 60% of our waste. We need to reverse this trend and ensure that we keep the materials in the economic cycle, through reuse and recycling, for as long as possible.

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Plymouth residents fight against new incinerator operations

Nov 25th, 2013
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The city council of Plymouth faced strong backlash from residents for approving the building of a new incinerator while ‘operating in camera’. Initially threatening the incinerator opposition with a huge punitive compensation for the MNC behind the project, MVV, if the incinerator could not go ahead, local residents managed to block the incinerator from starting operations by exposing MVV for not having an approved ash deposit site before they started construction work on the incinerator. At the moment, MVV has been formally denied any plans to deposit incinerator ash in the neighbouring towns of Devon county, but MVV officials insist that the incinerator will be operation as scheduled, in 2014.

The new Plymouth incinerator, Jul 2013 (Plymouth Herald)

Read the coverage from the Plymouth Herald here:

Book excerpt: Incineration: The Biggest Obstacle to Zero Waste

Nov 18th, 2013
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by Paul Connett, posted on Earth Island Journal:

It is hard to understand why any rational official living in the twenty-first century and facing the critical need to develop sustainable solutions would countenance the squandering of finite material and huge financial resources on a nonsustainable practice like incineration. One European report has estimated that a combination of recycling and composting lowers greenhouse gas production forty-six times more than an incinerator producing electricity.

Incineration might make sense if we had another planet to go to, but without that sci-fi escape it must be resisted in favor 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 landfilling attempt to bury the evidence of an unacceptable throwaway lifestyle. Every incinerator built delays this fundamental realization by at least twenty-five years – about the time it takes to pay back the huge capital costs involved in building the facility, and during that time it has to be fed, leaving little room to allow for more sustainable solutions to coexist.

Ten Arguments Against Incineration
Argument 1: Incinerators Are Very Expensive

Incinerators remain formidably expensive, but that expense is often hidden from public view with giant public subsidies. To pay for the capital and operating costs, as well as the operators’ profit margins, the community or region will have to sign put-or-pay agreements, which trap them for twenty-five years or more. As the industry has struggled to make incineration safe, it has priced itself out of the market – or it would have if the market was applied on a level playing field.

Over half the capital cost of an incinerator built today goes into air pollution control equipment. Ironically, if the waste were not burned in the first place this hugely expensive equipment would not be necessary, nor would the toxic ash collected in these devices have to be sent to an expensive hazardous waste landfill, nor would the air emissions be subjected to very costly monitoring. But the public is being kept ill informed about the poor economics of incineration. Instead, they are being told that incineration is going to save their communities money.

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Lund-Harket: Energy from burning waste? Bad news for the climate

Nov 15th, 2013
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from Sam Lund-Harket, writing for the World Development Movement:

On Dirty Energy Month’s Global Day of Action – Don’t Burn Our Future: Against Waste Burning and for Zero Waste. Mariel Vilella from Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) writes about the consequences of refuse dirived fuel projects.

Municipal governments throughout the world are facing choices about how to manage the unending stream of waste generated by their residents and businesses. In some places landfills and dumpsites are filling up, and all landfills and dumpsites leak into the environment. As populations continue to grow, the issue of waste becomes more urgent and more complicated. Many regions are already facing a waste crisis, and drastic measures are needed.

It’s a golden opportunity for private companies with “innovative” waste technologies, which they claim, will not only eliminate waste but will also generate energy. Some municipal governments, seduced by the idea that they will be able to turn their urgent problem into something of immediate value, have made the mistake of investing significantly in refuse derived fuel (RDF) projects, resulting in the burning of waste in incinerators, biomass plants, cement kilns, and other combustion units.

However, producing and burning RDF does not make household and industrial waste disappear, nor is it an energy or climate solution. The basis of the technology is incineration, and the burning of garbage – whether in “waste to energy” (WTE) plants, incinerators, biomass plants, cement kilns, or other industrial burners – involves an unsustainable consumption of natural resources, pollutes the environment, increases climate change, compromises human health, and seriously disrupts the lives of huge numbers of informal sector recyclers, specially in the Global South.

Moreover, despite burning RDF involves paper, plastic, and metals that come from finite natural resources such as forests, energy from incinerators is considered ‘renewable’. Even if plastics and tires are made of oil; incinerators, biomass plants and cement kilns burn them as ‘alternative fuels’, taking advantage of this blatant ‘green washing’. Not only this is a distortion of what should be deemed a sustainable, clean, and renewable energy source, it’s an extremely inefficient use of resources, as it requires an enormous amount of waste to produce a small amount of energy. Ultimately, burning these resources creates a demand for more “waste” and discourages the real solutions: conservation, redesigned packaging and products, reuse, recycling, and composting.

Countries like the UK, China, India or the US, are strongly supporting the production and burning of RDF through the application of renewable energy subsidies to these practices, amongst other bonuses for these industries. Take the example of the planned Barton Renewable Energy Plant in Urmston, Greater Manchester, which if built, it will burn 75% biomass and 25% RDF. Despite the fierce opposition of the local Council and community, the UK government has pushed its approval arguing the necessity to meet the Renewable Energy national targets.

In China, the energy generated by incineration is subsidized at the same level as solar and wind power, and 0.38% of the energy cost on-grid is covered by public funds.  A similar situation can be found in India, where government’s pledge to double the capacity for renewable energy without mentioning specific sources has been met with skepticism and controversy.  In the US, most federal energy subsidies that benefit incineration are actually meant to support the development of real renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and micro-hydro, which should not have to compete against dirty energy for the same funding. Read more on this here.

Investments are needed to think waste out of the system, but not through burning but through practical, bottom-up, decentralized strategies and urban solutions for reducing climate pollution and conserving energy and natural resources. These efforts go hand-in-hand with clean production, producer responsibility, and waste minimization programs for dangerous and hard-to-recycle materials. In contrast with the primitive idea of burning our garbage, recycling and composting create livelihoods, save money, and protect the environment and public health.

8 Nov 2013

GAIA: Waste Incinerators – Bad News for Recycling and Waste Reduction

Nov 15th, 2013
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from GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives), October 2013 edition

Waste incineration undermines recycling. Rather than operating in tandem—where recyclables are recycled and only non-recyclables are burned—incineration and recycling typically compete for the same waste materials, the same government funds, and the same waste management contracts. This conflict is particularly clear in so-called “waste-to-energy” incinerators, and is also true for burners that do not recover energy. Despite the fact that incinerators are below recycling in the waste hierarchy, they are very often prioritized above recycling at the local level, and as a result, they have had a consistently negative impact on waste prevention and recycling efforts, as well as on workers who make a living from recycling.

Incineration is an expensive and rigid, technology-dependent, long-term waste management strategy. Thus, for many local governments, opting for this method means using all or most of their waste management budgets, leaving little funds for strategies such as prevention, recycling, and composting. Incinerators that produce some energy depend upon the materials in waste that have high calorific value, and the items with high calorific value are precisely the materials readily processed by recycling programs: paper, cardboard, and plastics. Burning these valuable materials is wasteful because incineration captures only one fifth of the calories in these materials, while recycling saves three to five times the energy due to energy savings from using recycled feedstock for manufacturing instead of extracting virgin resources.

When competing for the same materials, incineration tends to beat out recycling for several reasons:

1. Incineration contracts typically include a “put-or-pay” clause that requires the municipality to deliver a minimum quantity of waste or pay fees to compensate the incinerator company for lost profits. Put-or-pay agreements, which the incinerator industry typically includes in contracts, encourage the incineration of discards and undermine waste prevention, composting, and recycling.

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GAIA: Incinerators – Myths vs Facts about “Waste to Energy”

Nov 15th, 2013
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from GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives), February 2012 issue

INCINERATION is a waste treatment technology that involves burning commercial, residential and hazardous waste. Incineration converts discarded materials, including paper, plastics, metals and food scraps into bottom ash, fly ash, combustion gases, air pollutants, wastewater, wastewater treatment sludge and heat. There are 113 waste incinerators in the U.S. and 86 of these are used to generate electricity. No new incinerators have been built in the U.S. after 1997, due to public opposition, identified health risks, high costs, and the increase of practices such as recycling and composting. In recent years, the incinerator industry has tried to expand their sector by marketing their facilities as “Waste to Energy” (WTE), using misleading claims.

MYTH 1: Waste incineration is a source of renewable energy.
FACT: Municipal waste is non-renewable, consisting of discarded materials such as paper, plastic and glass that are derived from finite natural resources such as forests that are being depleted at unsustainable rates. Burning these materials in order to generate electricity creates a demand for “waste” and discourages much-needed efforts to conserve resources, reduce packaging and waste and encourage recycling and composting. More than 90% of materials currently disposed of in incinerators and landfills can be reused, recycled and composted.1 Providing subsidies or incentives for incineration encourages local governments to destroy these materials, rather than investing in environmentally sound and energy conserving practices such as recycling and composting.

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Incinerators shown to be worst option; HK officials press with Shek Kwu Chau as ‘best option’

Nov 13th, 2013
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It is a bad plan that cannot be altered” – Publilius Syrus

Hong Kong officials are adamant about pressing ahead with the Shek Kwu Chau incinerator as the future for the city’s municipal solid waste treatment. After readers of the SCMP sent in suggestions to avert such a course, a representative from the Environmental Protection Department, Elvis W.K. Au, sent in a discombobulating response. It reads:

I wish to respond to the letters by Mary Melville on the disposal of food waste (“Environment-friendly fix makes molehill of food waste mountain [1]”, October 12) and Frank Lee on thermal waste treatment technologies (“Officials stick with outdated technology [2]”, October 24).

We have already examined the use of a food waste grinder. It merely transfers the food waste from the solid waste disposal system to the liquid waste disposal system without any enhanced treatment.

It would also increase both sewage pollution loads and the amount of sewage, with adverse impact on the existing sewerage network and sewage treatment works. The higher solid contents will lead to the need for higher sewer maintenance frequency and costs, as well as higher risks of sewer blockage.

Continue reading this absurd letter here:

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