A BURNING ISSUE
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THE CONNAUGHT WASTE MANAGEMENT PLAN A BURNING ISSUE - the view from a citizen group Galway for a Safe Environment (GSE) Phone 087-238 0452 or 087-232 8211 Address: c/o Galway One World Centre, 1 The Small Crane, William Street West, Galway SUMMARY OF THE CONNAUGHT PLAN The Connaught Draft Waste Management Plan (Published Sept. 1999) is being prepared by M.C. OëSullivan & Co. LTD. in association with COWI (Denmark) & Mary Murphy & Associates (PR firm) for the local Authorities in Counties Galway, Mayo, Roscommon, Leitrim and Sligo. The plan is open for submissions from the public until March 31st next. This plan is based on the National Policy on Waste Management (Dept. of Environment, Sept. 1998) which policy aims over 15 Years include: Diversion of 50% of overall household waste away from landfill. Minimum 65% reduction in biodegradable wastes consigned to landfill. Recycling of 35% of municipal waste. The Connaught Waste Plan proposes: Three alternatives: 1) Maximum recycling (£25 million cheaper) 2) Recycling and incineration 3) Fastest possible incineration and recycling The third option is recommended as follows: Incinerator located near Galway City, to burn approx. 184,000 tonnes of rubbish per annum, by 2013 (44% of waste by 2013, without construction waste).Four possible sites identified, Castlegar, Brockagh, Coolagh/Ardaun & Galway docks Recycling initiatives to handle approx. 160,000 tonnes per annum, by 2013 (38% of waste) Residual landfills handling approx. 80,000 tonnes p.a.(19% of waste). Possible sites identified as Newbridge, New Inn and Ballinahistle (Kilrickle). Total investment cost in the region of £300 million. GENERAL CRITICISMS Not one mention of health issues - no reference to DIOXINS in over 120 pages. (previous Strategy Report glosses over the issue) No mention of how the toxic ash will be handled (again the previous Strategy Report glosses over the issue) Very sketchy details on economic forecasts. Even though recycling is cheapest, it was written off as not being able to meet the national targets, despite the fact that many places in the world are surpassing those targets! Traffic in the vicinity of the incinerator will be huge - 184,000 + 60,000 = 224,000 tonnes p.a.- at least 10,000 lorry journeys per annum. The same holds true for the landfills. One of the worst problems in landfills is the leachate created by organic material such as food waste. 100% of this waste must be kept out of landfills to make them safe. OUR CONCLUSIONS The Connaught Draft Waste Management Plan is an attempt to stampede the people of the West into accepting an incinerator in or near Galway City. The alternative is NOT ì2 or 3 more big landfillsî. The consultants have acted irresponsibly in totally ignoring the health effects of large-scale incineration. The economic arguments as presented are totally inadequate. Why canít we try to re-cycle at least 50% of our waste over a 5- year period - and then re-examine the situation? No waste management plan without independent health survey. REMEMBER - MARCH 31ST IS THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS ON THE PLAN. OUR LAST CHANCE. WHY WE DO NOT WANT INCINERATION: INCINERATION IS A HEALTH THREAT When rubbish is burned approximately 70% to 80% goes up the stack and out into our air as gases, vapours and fine particles. Incinerators emit dangerous chemicals, including dioxins, furans, hydrogen chloride, nitric oxide, fine particulates of toxic metals such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, chromium etc. Once they have been turned into air pollution it is impossible to clean up. It ends up in our lungs and food. Pollution from incinerators travels great distances and lands on the farmland which grows our food(1). INCINERATION IS THEREFORE A MAJOR THREAT TO IRISH FARMING AND OUR FOOD INDUSTRY. * High dioxin emissions forced three incinerators in France to be closed down last year because they had contaminated 16 farms nearby and the cheese and milk from local dairies could no longer be sold (2). * Farmers near several incinerators in Japan found they had difficulty selling their produce when news of high dioxin levels in their vegetables was made public (3). In both these cases, the farmers were not at fault but they were the ones who suffered financially. The Wexford IFA issued the following statement in December 1999: ìFarmers have responsibility for their produce and are governed by a number of laws surrounding food production; emissions from an incinerator whether real or imaginary could cause food quality concerns with retailers or consumers. Therefore, Wexford IFA would urge Wexford Co. Council to reject the South East Regional Authorityís Waste Strategy.î Wexford county council rejected their waste plan 19 to 1 in January 2000. The EPA expert brought in to assure the councillors of the safety of incineration was unable to satisfactorily answer most of their questions! (4) The Irish Doctors Environmental Association (IDEA) issued the following statement in November 1999: ìThe Irish Doctors Environmental Association strongly opposes the plans for a waste incinerator in Kilcock, as it does for other proposed sites throughout the country. Our concerns relate to the adverse health effects from toxic substances in the emissions, which being mainly fat soluble, accumulate in body tissues and are concentrated up the food-chain, eventually being absorbed by humans through consumption of e.g. cow's milk, meat, fish and eggs and subsequently passed to the foetus in a higher concentration. Possible ill-effects include altered immune responses and disordered endocrine effects such as decreased fertility, lowered I.Q. and cancer.î WASTE INCINERATORS ARE THE MAJOR SOURCE OF DIOXIN IN OUR ENVIRONMENT Official sources in the U.K. estimate that 52-82% of dioxin in their environment comes from domestic waste incinerator. (Traffic contributes 0.17 to 4.9%) (5) . In the U.S.A. the figure is 36% (6), in Denmark 34 to 36% (7) , in Holland 78.9% (8) and in Japan 90% (9) ! Dioxin is one of the most toxic substances known to man. Animal testing in Japan showed that 1 gram of dioxin is enough to kill 10,000 people (10) . POLLUTION FROM INCINERATORS END UP IN OUR FOOD AND BODIES People often think that because they donít live near an incinerator they donít have to worry. Wrong! According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) we take in 90% of pollution into our bodies through food, especially food from animal origins. WHO testing done in many countries around the world found high levels of dioxin in mothers milk. Babies are the most vulnerable as they are the recipients of the largest amounts of dioxin before birth and via their mothers milk after birth. A recent EU report on dioxin states that the exposure of first born infants, up to 2 months of age, could be between 27 and 144 times greater than the WHO recommended limit, without considering dioxin like PCBs. Once dioxin is in our bodies it stays there for decades. No continuous monitoring of dioxins is possible - The EPA is on record saying companies would do their own monitoring, with spot checks. We know how badly landfills have been run and monitored in the past. Can we rely on the authorities to do any better with incinerators? INCINERATION DOES NOT ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR LANDFILL Ash from incinerators must be landfilled. 3 tonnes of rubbish burnt produces 1 tonne of ash, Therefore the Galway incinerator will produce approximately 60,000 tonnes of toxic ash per year. The better the pollution prevention equipment used on the stack the more toxic the ash. The fly ash, which is the ash trapped by the pollution control equipment, is so toxic that it normally has to be put in a toxic waste dumpsite, posing an even greater hazard to land and water than the original landfill (11). Will these landfills be in East Galway, or in Dublin or Cork? Recycling ash into products such as road fill and cement is a recipe for environmental and health disasters. INCINERATION IS VERY EXPENSIVE Incinerators are very expensive - a 2000 tonne per day facility built in Amsterdam in 1995 cost over $600 million, with over half the cost going into air-pollution control equipment (12)! Our local media reported that the costs of building the two plants in Germany which our councillors visited was £60 million and £140 million (13). We donít know what the operating costs would be. In order to pay off such cost, most incinerators have to operate for at least 25 years in order to pay off the ìmortgageî. And during that time, the amount of waste burned has to be maintained at a level which will provide the income required to pay off the mortgage (14). The Galway incinerator will only employ between 15 and 50 people (15). Recycling would employ many times more, and the profits would stay in Ireland. Studies show that more energy is recovered from recycling products than from burning them in ìwaste-to-energyì incinerators (16). The Connaught waste plan itself showed that the recycling option is £25 million cheaper than the other waste management combinations which included incineration. German incinerators contribute 1/2 percent of the energy requirements of that country (17) . Only about 10% of the income to the plant comes from the energy generated. The other 90% comes from the tipping fees. Tipping fees in the US / Germany are between $100 and $200/tonne (18). Incinerators are the only form of power plant which gets paid to accept the fuel it burns ! In Germany wind turbines are contributing three times the amount of energy from incinerators, and energy from wind is expected to increase dramatically in the future (19). The consultant has said that incinerators need to be retrofitted every ten years. Where will the rubbish go then? Will we need a second ìspareî incinerator? THE CHOICE IS NOT JUST BETWEEN LANDFILL AND INCINERATION Waste management includes the following options in order of preference: REDUCTION, REUSE, RECYCLING, COMPOSTING and after all that is done, LANDFILL AND INCINERATION. It has been estimated that as much as 80% of our waste could be recycled and composted. Many cities in North America have exceeded 50% already. The Halifax region in Nova Scotia, Canada, has already exceeded 60% recycling in just six years and expects to go higher (20). Their decision makers wanted to incinerate but after years of fighting were stopped in 1994 by concerned citizens and politicians of Halifax (21). INCINERATION OF RUBBISH IS IN DIRECT COMPETITION WITH RECYCLING Incineration competes with recycling for paper, cardboard and plastic. Will long-term contracts guaranteeing rubbish deliveries have to be signed? Is this what a Public-Private Partnership means? Plastics burn well, but are highly dangerous when burned as they are transformed into toxic gases including the notorious dioxin. Food and other organic wastes can be turned into compost rather than being burned. Metals and glass have been successfully recycled for decades. The National Policy on Waste Management, Sept. 1998, states the following: ìCare is necessary, however, to ensure that the development of WTE capacity does not militate against long-term investment in materials re-cyclingî Incinerators have killed off recycling in many cities around the world. Donít let it happen here. The advantage of incineration is that it does not need any sorting. It feeds into the ìout of sight, out of mindî mentality. Rubbish burnt is destroyed forever, transformed into air pollution and highly toxic ash. We have learnt in the past few decades that there are limits to the resources of our planet so, reduction, reuse and recycling are necessities. CITIZENS IN OTHER COUNTRIES WONíT ALLOW INCINERATORS TO BE BUILT, SO WHY SHOULD WE? In the U.S.A. in 1990, 140 incinerators were operating but between 1985 and 1998, over 300 incinerator projects were canceled. The incineration industry in the USA is dying. Some operating incinerators were prematurely shut down, such as the one at Glen Cove, Long Island, which closed in 1991 after only 8 years of service. Opposition at the local level has brought growth in the incinerator industry to a crawl (22). In April of this year, dioxin emissions from Japanese incinerators forced authorities to shut down 2,046 incinerators (23). The same story is happening around the world, so why on earth would Ireland import a technology that is being rejected everywhere else? IRELAND HAS THE CLEANEST FOOD IN EUROPE Testing of cows milk in Ireland compared to the UK, the Netherlands and Switzerland, countries which incinerate their wastes, shows that our levels of dioxin are far lower than in any of those countries (24). We may be the only country in Europe and North America that can currently meet the World Health Organizationís lowest recommended tolerable daily intake levels of dioxin. Ireland is accepted internationally as having the most dioxin-free food in the world - letís keep it that way. INCINERATION IS TOO RISKY. --------------------------------------------------------- Reference footnotes: 1. The case against Municipal Solid Waste Incineration, Min. of Environment & Energy, Ontario Government, Canada, 1992. 2. Irish Times, Wed, Feb. 04 1998. 3. Japan Times Series May 3-7, 1999. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/news5-99/news5-4.htmland February 9, 1999. http://www.kachina.net/~bphata/Home.htm 4. New Ross Standard, January 12, 1999 5. ERM 1995 6. USEPA, 1995. 7. Danish Environmental Protection Agency - 20 Oct. 1997. URL:http://www.chem.unep.ch/pops/DENDIOX.html 8. Bremmer et al. 1994 9. Mainichi Daily News.Monday, October 4, 1999. URL:http://www.mainichi.co.jp/english/news/opinion.html 10. Japan Times, May 7, 1999. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/news5 99/news.html#story4 11. The case against Municipal Solid Waste Incineration, Min. of Environment & Energy, Ontario Government, Canada, 1992. 12. Presentation by Dr. Paul Connett, at the 4th Annual International Management Conference, Waste to Energy. Nov.ë98. Amsterdam. 13. Galway Advertiser, Nov. 4, & The City Tribune, Nov. 5th ë99. 14. Presentation by Dr. Paul Connett, at the 4th Annual International Management Conference, Waste to Energy. Nov. ë98. Amsterdam. 15. Galway Waste Management Strategy Study, Dec. 1998 16. Thomas Rahn for the Pollution Probe Foundation, Toronto Canada. 1987 17. Der Grüne Punkt, Edition 3: Waste Incineration Processes in Germany, 3/1998 18. Presentation by Dr. Paul Connett, at the 4th Annual International Management Conference, Waste to Energy. Nov. ë98. Amsterdam. 19. EU report on Renewable Energy. 20. Personal communication with Planning & Development Officer, Environmental Industries & Technologies DivisionNova Scotia Dept. of Environment. 21. Press Release from the office of the Minister for the Environment, Nova Scotia. July 15, 1994. 22. Presentation by Dr. Paul Connett, at the 4th Annual International Management Conference, Waste to Energy. Nov. ë98. Amsterdam. 23. Asahi/Mainichi/Yomiuri/Pacific Stars and Stripes News. 06/04/99http://www.asahi.com/english/enews/enews.html#enews_21116 24. Dioxins in the Irish Environment, by Colman Concannon for the Environmental Protection Agency. April 1996. <!-- HTML Markup endspan --> </td> </tr> </table> <a name=bottom></a> </body> </html>