Just burn it. That’s what Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa wants to do with all the trash we’re piling onto our
dwindling landfills. “The idea would be to incinerate whatever we don’t want to recycle,” he said in an
Aug. 28, 2005 Maui News article. Not only would the island be getting rid of garbage, he said, but it
would also be generating electricity from a “renewable energy source.” Arakawa mentioned possibly
putting this “trash-to-energy” incinerator over by the Pulehu Landfill, though he admitted that he won’t
propose anything to the County Council until he’s gathered enough information about incinerators.
Well, I know how busy our mayor is, so I went ahead and researched modern trash-to-energy incinerators. To my surprise, I was able to find a lot of information on them. Too bad none of it was good.
AIR POLLUTION
1. “Incinerator proponents mistakenly claim that waste
burning reduces emissions of greenhouse gasses,” reported
the Philippines-based Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA)
in its 2003 report Waste Incineration: A Dying Technology.
“Their argument is based on the assumption that organic
wastes, if not incinerated, will decompose anaerobically in
a landfill, producing large quantities of methane (a potent
greenhouse gas) that will vent to the atmosphere.
However, [the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)]
concluded in a 1998 study that incineration and landfilling
of mixed municipal solid waste yield similar levels of net
greenhouse gas emissions.”
2. Incineration creates particulates—dust and soot saturated with dioxin and other toxic metals—that stay in the
atmosphere for a long time.
3. The pollution goes on round the clock. The H-POWER
incinerator on Oahu runs 24 hours a days, seven days a
week. All that burning, and they still produce just five percent of the island’s electricity.
4. To lower air emissions, incinerators rely on carbon injection—carbon particles are shot into the exhaust gasses,
which then soak up dioxin and other toxics. Unfortunately,
this technique creates “fly ash,” which causes an entirely
different set of problems.
FLY ASH
5. This stuff is bad. It requires disposal in special landfills
capable of disposing of toxic residue.
6. And incinerators produce a lot of fly ash. In 2003, company officials trying to build a $120 million incinerator in
Brighton, Australia admitted in a public hearing that their
proposed plant would spew at least 3,000 tons of fly ash
each year and not the 18 tons that was mentioned in project’s environmental report.
7. Getting rid of fly ash properly isn’t easy, but can be
done. It’s called vitrification, and it requires dumping the
ash into a melting furnace, where it’s fused into glass-like
nodules. The intense heat destroys any toxics in the ash.
8. This works, but it does have one minor problem. “[I]t
increases disposal costs by $20 to $30 per ton of waste,”
according to GAIA. “Vitrification of ash from municipal
waste combustion [also] consumes more energy than is
generated by burning the trash in the first place.”
9. Turns out that the less air pollution an incinerator puts
out, the more “fly ash” it creates. Or as GAIA’s 2003 report
put it, “A hundred times more dioxin may leave the incinerator on the fly ash than is emitted into the air from the
smoke stacks.”
DIOXIN
10. Burning plastic releases dioxin, a cancer-causing chemical
used in the herbicide Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.
11. Trash-to-energy incinerators run their exhaust through
heat exchangers. This allows for electricity generation, but
also leads to greater than usual dioxin formation.
12. No incinerator anywhere continuously monitors its air
emissions for dioxin. At most, they conduct a couple six-hour
“stack tests” each year, usually under optimum conditions.
13. In 1994, an incinerator operator running a dioxin-spewing facility in Columbus, Ohio specially treated the garbage
used during a stack test to make sure the results were
cleaner than usual. Even though an EPA official later wrote
that such actions “might constitute a criminal conspiracy
to violate federal environmental laws,” the agency accepted the test results.
14. Some proponents also say that burning medical waste
is a good way to get rid of dangerous biohazards, but most
of that junk is plastic, which creates dioxin when burned.
15. There is already more than enough dioxin in our environment as it is. Do we really need to keep producing it?
OTHER TOXICS
16. High furnace temperatures break down dioxin in an
incinerator, but they also increase the formation of other
toxics like nitric oxide, which helps create smog.
17. Injecting ammonia into the furnace will break down
nitric oxide, but that in turn releases particulates, which
are also dangerous.
18. Trash-to-energy incinerators also emit sulfur dioxide,
which can aggravate heart disease, emphysema and bronchitis as well as kill plants and see acid rain clouds.
19. And they put out PCBs, which may cause birth defects.
20. Oh, and incinerators also belch lead, mercury—both inorganic and methyl!—cadmium, chromium and arsenic, all of
which are probable or proven carcinogens that cause kidney
damage, neurological problems, birth defects and cancer.
COST
21. Trash-to-energy incinerators—at least the ones
equipped with the latest pollution control features—are
really expensive.
22. A 2,000-ton-per-day incinerator built a couple years
ago in the Netherlands cost $500 million American. Around
the same time, Japan bought two high-tech incinerators—
one cost nearly $700 million in U.S. dollars and the other
cost more than $800 million.
23. In fact, incinerator construction is so risky that the World
Bank has actually concluded that, “when applying waste incineration, the economic risk of project failure is high.”
BANKRUPTCY
24. The kind of money required to build incinerators can
only come through bonds—taxpayer-backed bonds. In the
1980s, taxpayers in Washington and Warren counties in
New York had to fork over $87 billion to pay off an incinerator run by Foster Wheeler. But as is typical in these matters, once the bonds were paid off ownership went to
Foster Wheeler instead of the counties. Sound fair?
25. Speaking of Foster Wheeler, in 1994 that firm got a
$400 million trash-to-energy incinerator built in Robbins,
Illinois. According to Reason Online, the whole works went
bankrupt in 2001. Bond investors were lucky to get back 45
cents on each dollar they invested.
26. In 1993, 29 towns surrounding Claremont, New
Hampshire had to declare municipal bankruptcy because
they ended up locked into 20-year contracts demanding
more trash than their respective towns could produce.
According to GAIA’s 2003 Waste Incineration report, “the
local municipalities found themselves paying exorbitant fees
to burn waste that they did not produce.” Unfortunately,
the courts threw out the town’s bankruptcy filing, forcing
them to raise taxes to pay off the incinerator operator.
27. Not to belabor the point, but something similar happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In 2003, that city’s incinerator—
run by the firm Covanta, which coincidentally also runs the
H-POWER incinerator on Oahu—went bankrupt, leaving the
city with $32.2 million in unpaid construction bonds.
LABOR
28. Cleaning fly ash out of an incinerator is tough.
Workers rarely wear protective clothing, even though the
ash is highly toxic. Often they end up storing the ash in
open pits, exposed to wind and rain.
29. Though incinerators are hideously expensive, they’re
not exactly job-creators. A typical trash-to-energy facility will
only employ a couple dozen engineers—about a tenth as
many jobs generated by a comprehensive recycling program.
30. This is Maui: resorts and restaurants can’t even fill
management positions. Where are we going to get waste
management engineers?
RECYCLING
31. Contrary to the promises from incinerator builders
and operators, burning trash to make energy doesn’t complement recycling. In fact, it hinders it.
32. That’s because the best way for incinerators to generate energy is for them to burn trash that’s got a “high
caloric value.” Unfortunately for recycling advocates, that
means incinerating lots of plastic, wood and paper. Simply
tossing old tires, Styrofoam containers and last night’s
chicken carcass into the furnace isn’t going to do it.
33. Keeping recyclable wood, paper and plastic from the
incinerator risks insufficient energy production, which
makes it more difficult for the county to off those multimillion dollar construction bonds. So you can pretty much
forget about instituting an island-wide recycling system.
34. This is tragic, because recycling actually saves more
energy than you get by burning waste. According to the
New Zealand group Zero Waste—which has so far succeeded in keeping incinerators completely out of that nation—
recycling plastic saves about four times the energy burning
it generates; paper recycling saves three times more energy; and recycling metal saves an amazing 30 to 888 times
the energy generated by incinerating it.
AESTHETICS
35. Incinerators smell like burning crap. MTW
MAUI TIME WEEKLY
SEPTEMBER 15, 2004
