Covanta believed that it could use the power of the incinerator to not only address the growing piles of trash being generated each year, but also help create electricity, too. By altering the amount of garbage in the fire and how much oxygen it received, waste-to-energy companies like Covanta were able to increase the efficiency of the burn, generating more energy with less waste. Each year, humans around the world send enough garbage to dumps to fill a square-mile landfill, roughly the size of metropolitan Paris.
GAIA's Wilson has a more straightforward approach to dealing with trash: Stop making it in the first place.
Whereas Gilman ticked off statistics demonstrating the safety of waste-to-energy, Wilson had just as many facts claiming the opposite.
If these plants produced so few dioxins, why did the new facility being built outside Toronto have to be closed down 13 times during the testing phase for emitting over the accepted amount? She also cited the closure of the waste-to-energy plant in Dumfries, Scotland, also for dioxin emissions. Peter Orris, a physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his life studying preventive medicine, especially related to environmental exposures.
Incinerators are also hungry machines. The high temperatures at which they burn require a lot of trash to keep the fire going, creating an ever-expanding market for trash. The more people throw away, the more money companies like Covanta make, Wilson says, because municipalities typically pay them per ton of trash. Researchers and advocates on both sides of the debate have cited Europe as the future of waste management.
To Gilman and Themelis, Europe is a model because it has greatly reduced landfill usage both by increasing recycling and composting, as well as turning to waste-to-energy plants. They are difficult to decompose and release harmful pollutants such as dioxins and heavy metals when they are incinerated. Today, thanks to the evolution of waste handling options, a majority of the materials in municipal solid waste can be composted or recycled.
This reduces impacts on the environment, including air, soil and water contamination and greenhouse gas emissions. As cities like New York and San Francisco adopt zero-waste policies that create incentives for diverting waste from landfills or incinerators, burning trash will increasingly become obsolete. Many U. Waste reduction and diversion will play a critical part in meeting these targets. The public is increasingly demanding more upstream solutions in the form of extended producer responsibility bills, plastic bans and less-toxic product redesign.
There is also a growing movement for less-consumptive lifestyles that favors zero-waste goals. Incinerators release many air pollutants, including nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides, particulate matter, lead, mercury, dioxins and furans. These substances are known to have serious public health effects , from increased cancer risk to respiratory illness, cardiac disease and reproductive, developmental and neurological problems.
According to recent figures from the waste industry, incinerator plants emit more sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide per unit of electricity generated than power plants burning natural gas. Research on direct health impacts of waste incineration in the United States is limited, but a handful of studies from Asia and Europe, where waste incinerators are prevalent, offer some insights. A single incinerator may burn anywhere from a few hundred tons to several thousand tons of waste per day.
Smaller incinerators typically have lower absolute emissions but can emit more hazardous pollutants for each ton of waste they burn.
Plant emissions also can vary widely based on the heterogeneous composition of municipal waste, the age and type of emissions control equipment, and how well the plant is operated and maintained over time. For each pollutant, at least 8 of the 12 incinerators with the highest emission rates nationwide were located in environmental justice communities. Ana Baptista is assistant professor of environmental policy and sustainability management at The New School.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Support Provided By: Learn more. Wednesday, Nov It can increase the risk of heart disease, aggravate respiratory ailments such as asthma and emphysema, and cause rashes, nausea, or headaches.
Backyard burning also produce harmful quantities of dioxins, a group of highly toxic chemicals that settle on crops and in our waterways where they eventually wind up in our food and affect our health.
The Human Health page provides more information about the dangers of dioxin. Typically, dioxins do not exist in materials before they are incinerated, but are produced when waste is burned. Significantly higher levels of dioxins are created by burning trash in burn barrels than in municipal incinerators. Household burn barrels receive limited oxygen, and thus burn at fairly low temperatures, producing not only dioxins, but a great deal of smoke and other pollutants. Unlike the barrels and boxes used in backyard burning, large incinerators are required by EPA regulations to have stringent pollution control systems that reduce dioxin emissions primarily by preventing their formation.
Backyard burning is also particularly dangerous because it releases pollutants at ground level where they are more readily inhaled or incorporated into the food chain.
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