At the end of his report into the health effects of pollution on children, Ralph Ryder concludes:
"The ever-increasing number of damaged babies being born around incinerators should be taken as a strong warning that the ‘experts’ and their friendly politicians are deliberately playing down overwhelming evidence of serious harm to suit industry’s financial interests, and, as it has been shown many times before, in many cases, their own."
Click here to download his report, "What do you want - a Boy or a Girl".
Even the most modern incinerators produce a deadly cocktail of chemicals, heavy metals and fine particulates. The chimney stacks of municipal waste incinerators typically discharge: aluminium, antimony, arsenic, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, iron, lead, magnesium, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, selenium, silver, thallium, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, zinc and zirconium; carbon monoxide, dioxins and furans, PCBs, PAHs, hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapour, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter.
Below is some further information about just two of these - dioxins and PM2.5 particles.
Reports from Greenpeace (Ref 3, page 11) and the British Society of Ecological Medicine (Ref 2, page 9) state that incinerator filters only remove 5-30% of PM2.5s from emissions. The monitoring of PM2.5s is as inadequate as the monitoring of dioxins.
Even now the government backed Health Protection Agency dismisses the effect of fine particulates from incinerators, pointing to figures from Defra from 2006 indicating that waste incineration contributed only 0.3% of the national emissions of air pollution particulates PM10, compared to 27% for traffic and 25% for industry (see article from 3 Sep 09).
However, Dr Vyvyan Howard's Statement of Evidence to the Ringaskiddy incinerator inquiry
in Ireland, dated June 2009, explains that the ultrafine particulates from
incinerators are particularly dangerous because they carry a range of toxins
including dioxins, PCBs and metals (see Dr Howard's report, 'Particulate
Emissions and Health').
References:
EurActiv.com Web Portal - Article on air quality standards
The
Health Effects of Waste Incinerators, 2005, The British Society for Ecological Medicine
Incineration
and Human Health, Greenpeace, 2001, (PDF document, 400kb)
World Health Organisation Air Quality Guidelines, Executive Summary
Environmental Statement, Sita - in PDF format - Scroll down to the bottom
of this page and click on the link to ENVIRONMENTAL STATEMENT VOL. 2 : (SECTIONS 8 - 15).
Breaches of emission limits
The safety record of even the most modern incinerators is patchy at
best. For
example the DERL energy-from-waste incinerator in Dundee was built in 2000.
SEPA reports that in November 2007 the plant was in breach of emission
limits for particulates, dioxins, furans and metals.[1] The following year it
failed an Operator Performance Assessment by breaching limits for dioxins and
furans.[2] Both of these breaches occurred in spite of the installation of £1.2m
of new clean up technology in 2004.[3]
Some
might say that a couple of emission breaches over a two-year period doesn’t
sound too serious. The problem is
that operators only have to measure dioxins twice a year, as stipulated by s5.6
of Scottish Government guidelines on incineration.[4]
Therefore the problem could have been going on for months before the
inspection. Equally, previous
measurements may have been taken on a day when things just happened to be a
little better than normal. Dr
Jeremy Thompson of the British Society for Ecological Medicine states that at
the very least there ought to be continual measurements of dioxins.