There is no disagreement about one fact: incineration/ gasification is the most costly way to dispose of waste. The World Bank has said that the cost of incineration is on average “an order of magnitude” greater than landfilling.10
Even Metro Vancouver has admitted that their plan could double the disposal fees paid by municipalities, residents and local businesses. As the sole wholesaler of disposal services for the region, Metro Vancouver will have us over a barrel.
And the costs will almost certainly be higher than Metro projected.
This is because one of the major costs will be servicing the staggering debt to buy the land and build the facilities. As we hear on the news every night, debt will cost a lot more in the wake of the Wall Street/Bay Street meltdown. (We are still paying $4 million each year in debt servicing costs for the incinerator we built in Burnaby 20 years ago.11)
Incinerators also require frequent costly upgrading to meet increasingly stringent emissions and performance standards. Metro Vancouver poured more than $41 million into upgrades to the Burnaby incinerator between 1993 and 2003. $23 million more is proposed for 2009.
Metro has access to sufficient disposal capacity to manage all of the region's municipal waste at much lower cost far into the foreseeable future. Why build brand new facilities when with modest upgrades the older ones can serve our needs while we achieve further waste reduction?
All incinerators emit substances that are known to cause cancers and other health impacts including nerve and brain damage. There is no known safe level of exposure to some of these substances, such as dioxins.12
Experts agree that we have the technology to measure the quantities of these emissions coming from the stacks, but we do not fully understand the actual impacts of the emissions on human health and the environment.13
Not only does each substance have its own impacts, but in combination with each other the substances can have still further effects.There are new substances of concern being discovered every day, including the recently identified “nanoparticles” that are so small they can penetrate the brain.14
Worse, many of these toxic substances do not become harmless over time, but instead bioaccumulate as they are passed up the food chain and accumulate in our bodies. This is why the Canadian organization Prevent Cancer Now has launched a campaign against waste-to-energy incineration.15
The proposed Metro Vancouver incinerators will be located in densely populated urban areas and the natural air currents will carry the emissions up the Fraser Valley to threaten our neighbours in communities already experiencing respiratory problems from our transportation emissions.16
This is not a good time to be taking on a large public debt.
The banks will look closely at our ability to repay it. To guarantee that we can make our payments, we will have to demonstrate that there will be a steady flow of waste coming across the scales paying those high disposal fees.
What if we are truly entering a deep economic recession? Historically, the amount of waste we produce has tracked closely with economic cycles. An economic slowdown will certainly have significant impact on the quantity of waste we produce in our region.
Alternatively, what if we find ways to reduce our waste faster and further than Metro Vancouver predicts? What if the price of plastic or other commodities in the global commodity markets continues to climb, as it is doing now, so that it is snapped up by recycling markets rather than sent to the incinerators? What if producers start taking back or reducing unnecessary products and packaging, the way the grocers have now promised to do with plastic bags?
With fixed capacity that must be used, incinerators are a risky proposition financially in bad times and good.
Incineration takes all the carbon in our waste, turns it into carbon dioxide, and dumps it instantaneously into the atmosphere. An incinerator is, in effect, a landfill in the sky.
There is some debate – with no clear winner yet – about whether we should count the carbon coming from “renewable” sources like paper, wood, and food wastes when evaluating the climate impact of incineration. The argument goes that these materials are part of the normal cycle of carbon taken up by growing plants and then released as carbon dioxide when they decay naturally. But a growing school of thought says we should give some weight to these “biogenic” carbon emissions.17
But there is no controversy about the climate impact of “fossil” carbon in our waste. Burning plastics and other fossil-based materials in incinerators has the same impact on the climate as burning coal. The US EPA reports that plastics have grown from 0.5% of municipal waste discards in 1960 to 16.2% in 2006 and they continue to be the fastest-growing material in waste.19
Proponents claim that “waste-to-energy” plants reduce GHGs by displacing fossil-based energy. But here in BC 95% of our energy is hydro-electric, not fossil-based. Incinerators are a dirty source of energy that provides no benefits in British Columbia.
Beyond the direct carbon dioxide emissions, incinerators are a driver of climate change because they destroy materials which must then be replaced. The “embodied” energy in products (the energy used to manufacture throw-away products and packaging) adds up to over 30% of our society’s GHG emissions.20
Incineration wastes far more energy than it produces. Countless studies including one by our own federal government,21 have demonstrated that recycling saves 5 – 6 times more energy than incineration.
And for the products can’t be recycled? The solution is to redesign them so they can be recycled – or ban them altogether. Incineration lets producers of wasteful products off the hook – at our expense.
Economists talk about “opportunity costs,” referring to the things you don’t get to enjoy because you spend your money on something else.
The $3 billion we spend on incinerators can’t be spent on programs to reduce waste. It can’t be spent on education programs to help improve our recycling performance. It can’t be spent on police to enforce recycling rules. It can’t be spent on composting programs to return our organic wastes to the soil.
There are also future opportunity costs. The materials that we choose to destroy today in incinerators may be worth much more tomorrow as raw materials in production. From this point of view, a landfill has an edge over an incinerator as a place to “store” our wastes until we need them. The recent rise in commodity prices has prompted an international conference this month on landfill mining. You can go back and dig up materials you bury, but you can’t burn the same can of garbage twice.
People in BC may not realize that we are world leaders in a new policy approach that promises for the first time in the last hundred years to reverse the growth of waste.
As the story of Unintended Consequences shows (see sidebar) the Throw-Away Society came about – and continues today -- because we do not make producers responsible for ensuring that their products can be recycled. Because we always picked up after them, producers never learned how to pick up after themselves.
But legislation in BC is changing all that. Product by product we are holding producers responsible for taking back and recycling their products and packaging. Our Extended Producer Responsibility regulation is a model being adopted all across North America.
But this process will be derailed if Metro Vancouver builds massive incinerators to burn the very products and packaging that should go back to producers.
Metro Vancouver often points to Europe as a leader in EPR as well as in waste-to-energy incineration. But because the Europeans have over-built their incineration system, they are now backsliding on recycling. The European Packaging Directive originally required producers to recycle their packaging, but now they are allowed to burn it in waste-to-energy incinerators – a complete write-off on the embodied energy in the materials.
Incineration not only wastes energy, it lets producers off the hook and stalls progress towards better product and packaging design.
10Sources cited in “Incineration of Municipal Solid Waste, Understanding the Costs and Financial Risks, Fact Sheet 4”. Pembina Institute et al., May 9, 2007. (cited October 4, 2008)
11“Burning trash no money maker,” Surrey Leader, July 9, 2008.
12“Incineration Repackaged,” Stephen Lester, Everyone’s Backyard, Summer 2002. (cited October 6. 2008)
13Duke University research reviewed in Science Blog, 1996. (cited October 4, 2008)
14Chemist Paul Connett showed slides explaining the impacts of nanoparticles to audiences in Abbotsford, New Westminster and Vancouver last June.
15Prevent Cancer Now (cited October 3, 2008) The purpose of Prevent Cancer Now is to build a Canada-wide movement with the resolve to eliminate all avoidable causes of cancer.
16City of Chilliwack, (cited October 4, 2008), State of the Air Report, 2007, BC Lung Association. (cited October 4, 2007)
17Dr. Dominic Hogg of Eunomia Research and Consulting makes this case in A Changing Climate for Energy from Waste, March 2006
19Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006. (cited October 4. 2006)
20Stop Trashing the Climate, Full Report, June 2008. ILSR et al. (cited October 4, 2008)
21ICF Report (Determination of the Impact of Waste Management Activities on Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 2005 Update, October 31, 2005)