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INCINERATION DOES NOT ELIMINATE THE NEED FOR LANDFILL
Ash from incinerators must be land filled. 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.
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).
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