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What’s wrong with incineration?
We believe that the health risks from even the most up-to-date facilities are very significant despite the complacent coments of the UK’s so-called Health Protection Agency (HPA). Evidence for this is piling up all the time.
Two reports which damn incineratrors
The industry likes to tell us that modern incinerators are good for the environment as they produce energy (so-called energy recovery facilities, or energy from waste).
In fact, time and again, studies have demonstrated that burning waste is a very inefficient way of producing energy.
When waste is burnt in an incinerator, heat is produced which can be used to produce electricity. This displaces the need for an equivalent amount of electricity to be generated at a power station, saving the release of some CO2, a greenhouse gas. In Europe, many incinerators capture more energy by providing heating through hot water to nearby offices or homes (combined heat and power or CHP), but this more efficient system is only used in three of the UK’s incinerators. Even the ‘South East London Combined Heat and Power’ (SELCHP) plant in Southwark, opened in 1994, despite its name does not yet produce any heat for heating, as providing district heating proved ‘too expensive’! No wonder the Viridor reps at local meetings have been very cagey about the ‘potential’to use hot water for district heating locally- it won’t happen!
Simplistic claims are often made that burning waste in incinerators will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In reality, most incinerators are not very efficient at capturing energy from the waste they burn, due to the fact that they are primarily designed to be a method of reducing the volume of waste, and they have to have a lot of air pollution control equipment.
The Government has admitted this shortcoming in the new Waste Strategy for England: “Where fossil fuel based products are incinerated (e.g. plastics) they tend to generate energy less efficiently than using fossil fuel directly, hence are associated with an overall carbon cost”.
This means that incinerators release a large amount of CO2 to produce a small amount of energy. A waste to electricity incinerator actually releases 33 per cent more fossil-fuel derived CO2 per unit energy produced than a gas-fired power station. If heat from the incinerator is used, then performance is similar to a gas-fired power station.
For supporting references, see the briefings from Friends of the Earth:
www.foe.co.uk/resource/media_briefing/up_in_smoke.pdf
And http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/dirty_truths.pdf which deals with the climate impacts of incineration.
Taken together these reports make it clear that there is no place for incinerators in any long term sustainable waste management strategy.
The Beddington incinerator: a white elephant
The proposed incinerator is unnecessary and will result in waste being trucked into the area for 25 years, It is being proposed at a time when national waste production is in steady decline by about 3% each year.* and Britain has the potential to go much further: the current national average is only 42% (and about 35% in Croydon!); in Wales it is projected to reach 70% by 2025; in San Francisco, USA, they had reached 72% by 2009 and are expecting to be at ‘zero waste’ by 2020.
*2004 – 372 million tonnes ; 2008 – 334million tonnes
Even our own recycling minister’s recent pronouncement makes this incinerator obsolete in policy terms:
“We are determined to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing to achieve our ultimate aim of a zero waste economy.”
– Lord Taylor, Recycling Minister, Feb 2 2012
The capacity of the incinerator is 275,000 tonnes, broken down into 200,000 tonnes domestic with the residue of 75,000 tonnes coming from the Commercial and & Industrial sector. BUT the Viridor contract builds in declining rates of household waste being sent, as recycling rates increase. Although Viridor have refused to give us the figures, they have admitted that they will almost certainly be importing waste from outside the South London Waste Plan area. We estimate this may be in the region of 20% of the total waste, and could increase over time, despite assurances in the South London Waste Plan that a key principle is that waste should be dealt with locally. This is to ensure that the incinerator is operating at a commercially viable capacity. What this means in plain English is that
on the informative ukwin website. ukwin.org.uk/
Executive Summary of Ecomed report
We believe that the health risks from even the most up-to-date facilities are very significant despite the complacent coments of the UK’s so-called Health Protection Agency (HPA). Evidence for this is piling up all the time.
Two reports which damn incineratrors
- Essential reading is the detailed report by the British Society for Ecological Medicine (Ecomed).
Click here for a link to the Summary of their updated report. The full report , a response by the HPA and Ecomed’s reply to this can be found here
They conclude that “a policy of building more incinerators and cement kilns will mean that many more lives will be lost unnecessarily from cancer, including those of children, more people will die prematurely from heart disease, there will be an increase in birth defects and health costs will increase….there are far better ways of dealing with waste and these methods would be cheaper, would be safer and would produce more energy”.
- New (2012) European report raises alarm over nano-particles
The European Respiratory Journal (ERJ), the scientific journal of the European Respiratory Society, made up of respiratory researchers and medics. Their latest (March 2012) editorial severely criticises the EU commission for choosing the wrong limits for air quality, and discusses the reasons for this. They claim that fine particles (PM 2.5s) and Ozone are the most serious pollutants, and that there is an urgent need to reduce their concentrations significantly. “It is generally recognised that effects of ozone and fine particleshave a very low [safety] threshold, if indeed there is one. This means that exposure to levels even below the WHO [World Health Organisation] air quality guidelines can still be expected to produce sizeable adverse effects on public health. Reductions of air pollution over the past two decades have been shown to be associated with increases in life expectancy in the USA and improved respiratory health”
The article stresses that compliance with current limit values for major air pollutants in Europe confers no protection for public health. “In fact, very serious health effects occur at concentrations well below current limit values, especially those for fine particles”.
Although incinerators are of course far from the only source of fine particles, they will compound the health problems from al sources which are in any case set to rise for example with climate change leading to higher levels of ground level ozone. Nano-particles, so-called PM10s and PM2.5s are linked, among other things, to cardiovascular deaths and higher infant mortality rates.
The full article can be read at erj.ersjournals.com/content/39/3/525.full.pdf
Although incinerator fumes pass through expensive filter systems, modern incinerators still emit significant levels of NOx and of ultrafine particles. The latter includes nano-particles which are of great concern because they can pass through the lung lining, causing internal inflammation and penetrating to organs (even to the foetus in a pregnant mother). Several recent studies have concluded that air pollution is set to become a bigger global killer than even dirty water. [see for example OECD March 2012: “Urban air pollution is set to become the top environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, ahead of dirty water and lack of sanitation. The number of premature deaths from exposure to particulate air pollutants leading to respiratory failure could double from current levels to 3.6 million every year globally” ]
The HPA have failed to monitor health impacts of incinerators.
In Aug 2003, the newly-formed Health Protection Agency promised to examine healthdata around incinerators & landfill sites due to public concern. But they didn't bother, & were exposed in two Surrey papers on 22 May 2008, Dorking Advertiser & Surrey Mirror.
The above articles resulted from a Freedom of Information request to the HPA, asking for a list of incinerators around which they'd examined rates of illness & rates of premature deaths (at all ages) in electoral wards upwind & downwind of incinerators. The HPA admitted that they'd not checked the data around any incinerator & yet they still continued to tell people that there weren't any significant health risks. This has led councillors across the country to accept the HPA's "wisdom" and give incinerators the "green light" . belatedly the HPA have now announced a new study but this will not report until 2014 and is likely to be another whitewash, given past form.
The industry likes to tell us that modern incinerators are good for the environment as they produce energy (so-called energy recovery facilities, or energy from waste).
In fact, time and again, studies have demonstrated that burning waste is a very inefficient way of producing energy.
When waste is burnt in an incinerator, heat is produced which can be used to produce electricity. This displaces the need for an equivalent amount of electricity to be generated at a power station, saving the release of some CO2, a greenhouse gas. In Europe, many incinerators capture more energy by providing heating through hot water to nearby offices or homes (combined heat and power or CHP), but this more efficient system is only used in three of the UK’s incinerators. Even the ‘South East London Combined Heat and Power’ (SELCHP) plant in Southwark, opened in 1994, despite its name does not yet produce any heat for heating, as providing district heating proved ‘too expensive’! No wonder the Viridor reps at local meetings have been very cagey about the ‘potential’to use hot water for district heating locally- it won’t happen!
Simplistic claims are often made that burning waste in incinerators will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In reality, most incinerators are not very efficient at capturing energy from the waste they burn, due to the fact that they are primarily designed to be a method of reducing the volume of waste, and they have to have a lot of air pollution control equipment.
The Government has admitted this shortcoming in the new Waste Strategy for England: “Where fossil fuel based products are incinerated (e.g. plastics) they tend to generate energy less efficiently than using fossil fuel directly, hence are associated with an overall carbon cost”.
This means that incinerators release a large amount of CO2 to produce a small amount of energy. A waste to electricity incinerator actually releases 33 per cent more fossil-fuel derived CO2 per unit energy produced than a gas-fired power station. If heat from the incinerator is used, then performance is similar to a gas-fired power station.
For supporting references, see the briefings from Friends of the Earth:
www.foe.co.uk/resource/media_briefing/up_in_smoke.pdf
And http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/dirty_truths.pdf which deals with the climate impacts of incineration.
Taken together these reports make it clear that there is no place for incinerators in any long term sustainable waste management strategy.
The Beddington incinerator: a white elephant
The proposed incinerator is unnecessary and will result in waste being trucked into the area for 25 years, It is being proposed at a time when national waste production is in steady decline by about 3% each year.* and Britain has the potential to go much further: the current national average is only 42% (and about 35% in Croydon!); in Wales it is projected to reach 70% by 2025; in San Francisco, USA, they had reached 72% by 2009 and are expecting to be at ‘zero waste’ by 2020.
*2004 – 372 million tonnes ; 2008 – 334million tonnes
Even our own recycling minister’s recent pronouncement makes this incinerator obsolete in policy terms:
“We are determined to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing to achieve our ultimate aim of a zero waste economy.”
– Lord Taylor, Recycling Minister, Feb 2 2012
The capacity of the incinerator is 275,000 tonnes, broken down into 200,000 tonnes domestic with the residue of 75,000 tonnes coming from the Commercial and & Industrial sector. BUT the Viridor contract builds in declining rates of household waste being sent, as recycling rates increase. Although Viridor have refused to give us the figures, they have admitted that they will almost certainly be importing waste from outside the South London Waste Plan area. We estimate this may be in the region of 20% of the total waste, and could increase over time, despite assurances in the South London Waste Plan that a key principle is that waste should be dealt with locally. This is to ensure that the incinerator is operating at a commercially viable capacity. What this means in plain English is that
- Materials will be sucked into the incinerator that could be reclaimed, re-used or recycled.
- Vehicles will be trucking waste into the area for over two decades.
on the informative ukwin website. ukwin.org.uk/
Executive Summary of Ecomed report
- Large studies have shown higher rates of adult and childhood cancer and also birth defects around municipal waste incinerators: the results are consistent with the associations being causal. A number of smaller epidemiological studies support this interpretation and suggest that the range of illnesses produced by incinerators may be much wider.
- Incinerator emissions are a major source of fine particulates, of toxic metals and of more than 200 organic chemicals, including known carcinogens, mutagens, and hormone disrupters. Emissions also contain other unidentified compounds whose potential for harm is as yet unknown, as was once the case with dioxins. Since the nature of waste is continually changing, so is the chemical nature of the incinerator emissions and therefore the potential for adverse health effects.
- Present safety measures are designed to avoid acute toxic effects in the immediate neighbourhood, but ignore the fact that many of the pollutants bioaccumulate, enter the food chain and can cause chronic illnesses over time and over a much wider geographical area. No official attempts have been made to assess the effects of emissions on long-term health.
- Incinerators produce bottom and fly ash which amount to 30-50% by volume of the original waste (if compacted), and require transportation to landfill sites. Abatement equipment in modern incinerators merely transfers the toxic load, notably that of dioxins and heavy metals, from airborne emissions to the fly ash. This fly ash is light, readily windborne and mostly of low particle size. It represents a considerable and poorly understood health hazard.
- Two large cohort studies in America have shown that fine (PM2.5) particulate air pollution causes increases in all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality and mortality from lung cancer, after adjustment for other factors. A more recent, well-designed study of morbidity and mortality in postmenopausal women has confirmed this, showing a 76% increase in cardiovascular and 83% increase in cerebrovascular mortality in women exposed to higher levels of fine particulates. These fine particulates are primarily produced by combustion processes and are emitted in large quantities by incinerators. • Higher levels of fine particulates have been associated with an increased prevalence of asthma and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).
- Fine particulates formed in incinerators in the presence of toxic metals and organic toxins (including those known to be carcinogens), adsorb these pollutants and carry them into the blood stream and into the cells of the body.
- Toxic metals accumulate in the body and have been implicated in a range of emotional and behavioural problems in children including autism, dyslexia, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning difficulties, and delinquency, and in problems in adults including violence, dementia, depression and Parkinson’s disease. Increased rates of autism and learning disabilities have been noted to occur around sites that release mercury into the environment. Toxic metals are universally present in incinerator emissions and present in high concentrations in the fly ash.
- Susceptibility to chemical pollutants varies, depending on genetic and acquired factors, with the maximum impact being on the foetus. Acute exposure can lead to sensitisation of some individuals, leaving them with lifelong low dose chemical sensitivity.
- Few chemical combinations have been tested for toxicity, even though synergistic effects have been demonstrated in the majority of cases when this testing has been done. This synergy could greatly increase the toxicity of the pollutants emitted, but this danger has not been assessed.
- Both cancer and asthma have increased relentlessly along with industrialisation, and cancer rates have been shown to correlate geographically with both toxic waste treatment facilities and the presence of chemical industries, pointing to an urgent need to reduce our exposure.
- In the UK, some incinerators burn radioactive material producing radioactive particulates. Inhalation allows entry into the body of this radioactive material which can subsequently emit alpha or beta radiation. These types of radiation have low danger outside the body but are highly destructive within. No studies have been done to assess the danger to health of these radioactive emissions.
- Some chemical pollutants such as polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals are known to cause genetic changes. This represents not only a risk to present generations but to future generations.
- Monitoring of incinerators has been unsatisfactory in the lack of rigor, the infrequency of monitoring, the small number of compounds measured, the levels deemed acceptable, and the absence of biological monitoring. Approval of new installations has depended on modelling data, supposed to be scientific measures of safety, even though the method used has no more than a 30% accuracy of predicting pollutants levels correctly and ignores the important problems of secondary particulates and chemical interactions.
- It has been claimed that modern abatement procedures render the emissions from incinerators safe, but this is impossible to establish and would apply only to emissions generated under standard operating conditions. Of much more concern are non-standard operating conditions including start-up and shutdown when large volumes of pollutants are released within a short period of time. Two of the most hazardous emissions – fine particulates and heavy metals – are relatively resistant to removal.
- The safety of new incinerator installations cannot be established in advance and, although rigorous independent health monitoring might give rise to suspicions of adverse effects on the foetus and infant within a few years, this type of monitoring has not been put in place, and in the short term would not reach statistical significance for individual installations. Other effects, such as adult cancers, could be delayed for at least ten to twenty years. It would therefore be appropriate to apply the precautionary principle here.
- There are now alternative methods of dealing with waste which would avoid the main health hazards of incineration, would produce more energy and would be far cheaper in real terms, if the health costs were taken into account.
- Incinerators presently contravene basic human rights as stated by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, in particular the Right to Life under the European Human Rights Convention, but also the Stockholm Convention and the Environmental Protection Act of 1990. The foetus, infant and child are most at risk from incinerator emissions: their rights are therefore being ignored and violated, which is not in keeping with the concept of a just where their health effects will be maximal: this needs urgent review.
- Reviewing the literature for the second edition has confirmed our earlier conclusions. Recent research, including that relating to fine and ultrafine particulates, the costs of incineration, together with research investigating non-standard emissions from incinerators, has demonstrated that the hazards of incineration are greater than previously realised. The accumulated evidence on the health risks of incinerators is simply too strong to ignore and their use cannot be justified now that better, cheaper and far less hazardous methods of waste disposal have become available. We therefore conclude that no more incinerators should be approved.