Municipal waste incineration
A poor solution for the twenty first century
Paul Connett's speech on incineration and waste reduction
Paul
Connett
At the 4th Annual International Management
Conference
Waste-To-Energy, Nov. 24 & 25, 1998, Amsterdam.
About the author
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.
Executive Summary
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.
Introduction
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. Toxic emissions
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. Ash disposal.
2.1 Fly ash hazard often obscured.
2.2 Ash represents a Catch-22 for the incineration industry.
3. Economic costs.
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. The waste of energy involved.
4.1. Modern incinerators do produce saleable energy.
4.2 Reality versus Public relations.
4.2.1 Consider these simple points:
4.3 Recycling saves more energy than incineration yields.
4.4 A larger vision is needed.
5. Public opposition.
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.
5.3.1 Germany.
5.3.2 France.
5.3.3 Bangladesh.
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. A few words on the alternatives.
6.1 Landfills.
6.2 The importance of composting.
6.3 Integrated waste management.
6.4 Five principles.
7. Sustainability.
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.
8. Conclusion
1. Toxic emissions
Introduction.
Let me acknowledge out 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.
1.1 Hydrogen chloride is formed.
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.
1.2 Nitric oxide is generated.
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.
1.3 Toxic metals are released.
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.
1.3.1 Mercury, a highly problematic pollutant, is difficult to control.
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?
1.4 Dioxins, Furans and other by-products of combustion are formed.
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.
1.4.1 Post combustion formation of dioxin.
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.
1.4.2 The fly ash dioxin problem.
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.
1.4.3 No continuous monitoring of dioxins possible.
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.
1.4.4 Rising concern about current dioxin levels.
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.
1.4.5 Dioxin emissions easily captured in food chains.
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).
1.4.6 Ireland.
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.
1.4.7 Advances in one country do not always translate to success in others.
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.
1.5 End-of-the-pipe control
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.
1.6 Modifications to counteract one pollutant can lead to increases in
others.
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.
2. Ash Disposal
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
2.1 Fly ash hazard often obscured.
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.
2.2 Ash represents a Catch-22 for the incineration industry.
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.
3. Economic costs
3.1. Incinerators are formidably expensive.
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.
3.2. Very few jobs are created for this massive economic investment.
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.
3.3 Most of the money invested in the incinerator leaves the community.
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.
3.4 Loss of capital is acute in developing economies.
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.
3.5 Taxpayers usually find out true costs when it is too late.
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.
4. Incineration is a waste of energy
4.1. Modern incinerators do produce saleable energy.
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.
4.2 Reality versus Public relations.
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.
4.2.1 Consider these simple points:
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.
4.3 Recycling saves more energy than incineration yields.
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.
4.4 A larger vision is needed.
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.
5. Public Opposition
5.1. In the US incineration is the most unpopular technology since nuclear
power.
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.
5.2 US development at a standstill.
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.
5.3 Opposition in other countries.
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.
5.3.1 Germany.
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.
5.3.2 France.
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.
5.3.3 Bangladesh.
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.
5.4 The dangers of ignoring public opinion.
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?
5.5 Look at more than one option.
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".
5.6 Even a true believer should not lead with incineration.
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.
5.7 The non-burn alternatives are more popular.
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.
6. A few words about alternatives
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.
6.1 Landfills.
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.
6.2 The importance of composting.
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.
6.3 Integrated waste management.
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.
6.4 Five principles.
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
7.1 Cheap fossil fuels conceal our non-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.
7.2 Incineration is a wasted opportunity.
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.
7.3 Forces behind overconsumption.
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.
7.4 Fighting the dominant paradigm.
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."
7.5 Community building.
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.
http://www.cank.org.uk/connett1.html
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