Peace and Environment News* November 1995
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Peace and Environment News * November 1995 |
by Heather Burke
Within weeks of getting into office in June of this year, the Harris government lifted the ban on new incinerators in Ontario.
In September of 1992, the Ministry of Environment, under the former NDP government, banned the development of new municipal solid waste incinerators and enacted stricter standards for existing incinerators. The Environment Minister at the time, Ruth Grier, called incinerators "a technological quick fix which creates new environmental problems without solving old ones."
Grier outlined five reasons for the ban.
Air emissions from incinerators pose a threat to human health as well as contributing to acid rain, smog and global warming. Even with the latest emission controls, incinerators still release many pollutants, including toxic heavy metals (lead, mercury, arsenic and cadmium), dioxins, PCBs, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, hydrochloric acid, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Scientists believe that for many of these toxins, there is no truly safe exposure level. The Ministry also acknowledged that incinerators emit hundreds of other compounds that have not been studied long enough to know whether or not they pose a potential health or environmental hazard.
Incinerators cannot make garbage "disappear." Two-thirds of the waste goes into the air as gases and ash. The other third is left as solid waste residue in the bottom of the incinerator. This slag consists of very concentrated toxins that must be disposed of at expensive hazardous waste treatment facilities and landfills.
The key fuels for incinerators are recyclable materials, such as paper and plastic. This works against programs supporting waste reduction, reuse and recycling, since materials which could potentially be recycled will be required to fuel incinerators. Future demand for paper and plastics would then require virgin materials, since a supply of recycled products would not be available. Lack of recyclable material would also inhibit research into new ways to recycle, since the recycled materials needed to make a project economically feasible would not be available.
Incineration is also less cost effective than recycling and other waste disposal options, including landfills. Capital and operating costs for incinerators are two to three times more than for landfills. In addition, landfills would still be needed to dispose of the slag from incinerators. Although this amounts to only one-third the original amount of waste, it is considered hazardous waste and would have to be disposed of appropriately in much more expensive hazardous waste landfills.
Supporters of incinerators boast of the energy which is created by the burning of waste. The energy recaptured however is minimal compared to the amount of energy required to process raw materials into finished products, since the option of recycling was burned up in the incinerator.
Finally, there is the immeasurable cost associated with the damage to human health and the environment which incineration causes.
As a final reason for banning incineration, the Ministry of the Environment stated that it was against their policy of protecting the air, water and land through pollution prevention.
Now, three years later, the new government has released a 35-page information package explaining the new regulations. Nowhere in the package do they address the issue of why they feel it is necessary to reverse the ban on incineration. They do not claim that new technologies have reduced emission levels. Nor do they state that new studies have shown the toxins released are not as hazardous as they once believed. Instead, the information package limits itself to looking at how strict the proposed Ontario standards are compared to the standards for emission levels elsewhere in North America.
In most cases, the government has adopted U.S. EPA-recommended standards for incineration. These are standards that the EPA is trying to implement in the U.S but has not yet been able to do so as it would involve expensive changes to incinerators that are already operational. One benefit of having incinerators banned for three years in this province is that the government has been able to create tough regulations for them without protest from present incinerator operators. The question is whether these emission standards are tough enough yet.
The government has decided not to adopt the EPA-recommended emission limit for nitrogen oxides, since "there is no commercially available technology that can consistently achieve the proposed U.S. EPA emission limits." Nitrogen oxides are linked to acid rain and smog.
The reason for the strict emission standards which the U.S. government is proposing was outlined for Congress this spring by the Assistant Surgeon General from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He explained to Congress that a great deal more research on incineration must be done before we can judge how safe it is. He said there are many gaps in our knowledge regarding the full impact of incineration. For example, there have been too few studies on actual human health impacts of incineration emissions or on the effects as the toxins from incineration move their way up the food chain. He listed many other areas that require further study.
With all of the problems associated with incineration and very questionable benefits at most, you have to wonder whether the Conservative government revoked the ban for purely political reasons.
To get a copy of the Ministry's information package, call or write to EBR Incineration Comments, Science and Technology Branch, Ministry of Environment and Energy, 2 St. Clair Avenue West, 14th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M4V 1L5, phone 1-800-565-4923. For information on citizen action on incineration, contact the Don't Burn Ontario Coalition, Paul Muldoon, Canadian Environmental Law Association, 517 College Street, Suite 401, Toronto, Ontario, M6G 4A2, phone (416) 960-2284.
Heather Burke is a regular contributor to the Peace and Environment News.
Converted September 4, 2000 - Lg
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