|
Rachel's
Democracy & Health News #863, July 13, 2006
INCINERATORS ARE
IMPEDING THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABILITY
[Rachel's introduction: In the U.S. and worldwide, waste
incinerators are once again popping up like poisonous mushrooms. As
each new incinerator is built, the hope for a sustainable economy
fades further into the distance.]
By Peter Montague
Across the U.S.
-- and, indeed, across the world -- waste incinerators are making a
comeback. Why? Because there's a huge amount of money to be made.
Globally, government officials are proposing to spend hundreds of
billions of tax dollars to build a new generation of incinerators.
In some cases, government officials are merely naive about the huge
problems incinerators create, but in other cases officials seem to
have been seduced by all that money.
During the 1980s, every state in the U.S. was targeted for several
waste incinerators -- "waste to energy" plants, as they were known
at that time. (The incinerator industry has always called its
machines something besides "incinerators.") These incinerators
burned garbage or medical waste and they were filthy, dangerous,
expensive, unreliable, materials-destroying, energy-wasting
contraptions -- and citizen groups all across the country got
organized and managed to stop more than 90% of the proposed
incinerators. It was a huge victory and a convincing demonstration
that sensible change can occur when a loose coalition of committed,
organized citizens makes it happen.
Now a new generation of incinerators is being proposed, but the name
has been changed again. Instead of "waste to energy" plants we now
have proposals for gasification plants, pyrolysis machines, and
plasma arc facilities. These are nothing more than "incinerators in
disguise" -- which is the title of an important
new report from
Greenaction
and GAIA -- the
two best-known and most effective incinerator- fighters in the U.S.
and arguably around the world. (Greenaction is run by Bradley Angel
with offices in California, Arizona and Utah. GAIA is run by Manny
Colonzo, with offices in Quezon City, Philippines, and Berkeley,
Calif.)
There are basically two problems with incinerators -- no matter what
name you may give them. First, they produce dangerous wastes in the
form of gases and ash, often creating entirely new hazards, like
dioxins and furans, that were not present in the raw waste.
Secondly -- and even more importantly -- incinerators destroy
materials that must then be replaced. If I burn a piece of paper
instead of recycling it, someone has to manufacture a new piece of
paper from raw materials. This is tremendously wasteful because
manufacturing one ton of paper creates 98 tons of waste
products.[1,pg.51] On average, for every ton of products destroyed
in an incinerator, 71 tons of waste must be created somewhere else
to re- create those products -- mine wastes, forest wastes,
transportation wastes, energy wastes, and so on.[2] ("Waste to
energy" incinerators don't even make sense from an energy
perspective. For every unit of energy recovered by one of these
machines, three to 5 units of energy could have been saved by
recycling the products instead of destroying them in an incinerator
and then replacing them with new ones.[3, pg. 26])
By destroying useful resources that must then be replaced,
incinerators -- including plasma arc, pyrolysis, and gasification --
make our waste problems far worse then they would otherwise be.
Incinerators prevent us from adopting sensible modern ways of doing
business, namely "zero waste" and "clean
production."
This is why fighting incinerators is so crucially important --
incinerators are dinosaurs that prevent us from making the
transition to a modern lifestyle based on resource conservation and
clean production. If we don't win the fight against incinerators --
in the U.S. and worldwide -- we will never be able to make the
transition to a sustainable economy.
People who think we can make the transition to a sustainable economy
without stopping incinerators (in all their forms) are badly
mistaken.
Once you build an incinerator, you must "feed the machine" for the
next 40 years to get your investment back. Once you build an
incinerator, resource conservation, recycling and waste reduction
become "the enemy" because the machine must have a new load of fresh
garbage every day. The machine needs waste, so its very existence
serves as a major deterrent to less wasteful life styles and ways of
doing business. In sum: incinerators promote waste. They thrive on
waste. They need waste. They demand waste, Incinerators are a major
deterrent to clean production, full recycling, resource
conservation, zero waste, and a sustainable economy.
So why would anyone in their right mind want to build an
incinerator? The answer is simple: money. Lots of money.
An incinerator costs anywhere from $100 million to $500 million to
build. For argument's sake, let's say an incinerator costs $200
million. That money comes from the public treasury. Local
governments do not often see such large bundles of money flowing
their through budgets -- so an incinerator offers a unique
opportunity for local politicians and their friends to take their
cut, and it's perfectly legal. Bankers, accountants, lawyers,
engineers, consultants, realtors and political "fixers" can all
scoop off their small percentage. Even one tenth of one percent of
$200 million is $200,000 dollars. So an incinerator project causes
money to slosh around in the local economy in ways that no other
public works project is ever likely to do. At election time, some of
that money may kick back as campaign contributions to the officials
who made the decision to incinerate local waste. All perfectly
legal. But not good for democracy, human health, the natural
environment, or the future.
People who are engaged on the front lines of an incinerator fight
will want to get a copy of the new report from Greenaction and GAIA,
"Incinerators in Disguise." (And they will also
want see the earlier report from GAIA and the
Institute for Local
Self Reliance,
Resources Up in Flames.)
The "Incinerators in Disguise" report offers case studies of modern
incinerator technologies and how they are "sold" to communities. As
you read through this report, a pattern emerges: the people selling
gasification, pyrolysis, and plasma arc incinerators all seem to use
similar techniques:
1. They are likely to claim that their machines produce no pollution
whatsoever. Obviously this is physically impossible, but this does
not stop them from making the bogus claim. Often local officials
accept these impossible claims without question.
2. Government officials often exempt these machines from laws
requiring environmental assessments. The machines may be given
licenses to operate without an examination of any performance data
whatsoever. (Could this be the money effect at work? It's a fair
question.)
3. Some companies are selling machines with which they have
absolutely no experience. They are selling something that is
entirely unknown and experimental, though they may claim (or imply)
that they have years of experience with similar machines. Deep
skepticism is justified.
4. Companies may describe their machines as "commercial successes"
even after their machines have failed to operate properly during
multi-year tests and have been permanently shut down and abandoned,
incurring major financial losses for the companies.
In sum, every industry has some "bad apples" who cut corners,
misrepresent the truth, and falsify information. But the incinerator
industry seems to have far more than its fair share of "bad apples."
This was as true 25 years ago as it is today. For some reason --
perhaps it's just the easy money -- bad apples seem to dominate this
industry.
This is especially regrettable because this is an industry whose
money-making schemes can prevent us all from reaching the world we
are all working to achieve -- the world of resource conservation,
zero waste, and sustainability.
Hats off to Greenaction and GAIA for once again blowing the whistle
on these nefarious junkyard dogs!
==============
[1] Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins.
Natural Capitalism; Creating the Next Industrial
Revolution. And see http://www.natcap.org/
[2] John E. Young and Aaron Sachs,
The
Next Efficiency Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Materials Economy.
Washington, D.C. Worldwatch Institute, 1994, pg. 13.
[3] Brenda Platt,
Resources Up in Flames; The Economic Pitfalls of
Incineration versus a Zero Waste Approach in the Global South.
Quezon City, Philippines, 2004), pg. 26.
================================================
please read also:
garbage-overflow_en.htm |
