Cheap waste disposal prevents us from making progress against pollution.
So long as waste disposal remains cheap, corporations and governments have little incentive to recycle, re-use, compost, or avoid making waste in the first place.
If disposal is cheap, there is no compelling reason to invest in green chemistry, clean production, alternative energy, green building, or cradle-to-cradle manufacturing.
Garbage incinerators are making a big comeback in the U.S. -- or trying to. The City of Los Angeles, California is thinking about building seven of them. There may be as many as 40 (or more) proposed incinerators of one kind or another in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the lower 48. All of them promise to take mixed municipal waste and heat it up to reduce the volume of garbage and extract small amounts of useful energy in the process.
Heating mixed waste (garbage) creates toxic air emissions and the toxicant-containing residual -- whether ash or a rock-like "clinker" -- will be buried in the ground where it remains available forever, threatening groundwater.
These new incinerators are never called "incinerators" -- they go by names like pyrolysis or gasification plants, or plasma arc melters, or simply "conversion" machines. But they all propose to heat mixed waste, extract some energy, and bury the leftovers in the ground.** The contribution of now-defunct incinerators to soil and water contamination is the subject of specific, multi-million dollar investigations in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Florida, California, and Ohio. And remember, this is just a review of news stories during a one-month period, October, 2006 (and the month isn't over yet).
Think about that. If garbage were defined as a "renewable energy resource," garbage incinerators would naturally become an official part of the nation's renewable energy strategy. This will be good for incinerator companies but bad for everyone else.
Burning garbage wastes huge amounts of energy because everything destroyed in an incinerator must be re-created from scratch starting with the mining and logging of virgin materials, transportation, processing, more transportation, and manufacture -- all accompanied by massive pollution and waste.
There can only be an endless supply of garbage if the U.S. maintains its wasteful lifestyle. When we get around to adopting a precautionary waste philosophy (zero waste), garbage will diminish dramatically. Incinerator companies that need garbage to feed their machines will oppose sensible solid waste policies by hook and by crook. We must therefore once again mount a serious campaign against them and their wasteful machines.
============== (via precaution.org)
Our thanks to Monica Wilson and Annie Leonard of GAIA for recent informative interviews about the resurgence of incineration in the U.S.
So long as waste disposal remains cheap, corporations and governments have little incentive to recycle, re-use, compost, or avoid making waste in the first place.
If disposal is cheap, there is no compelling reason to invest in green chemistry, clean production, alternative energy, green building, or cradle-to-cradle manufacturing.
Garbage incinerators are making a big comeback in the U.S. -- or trying to. The City of Los Angeles, California is thinking about building seven of them. There may be as many as 40 (or more) proposed incinerators of one kind or another in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the lower 48. All of them promise to take mixed municipal waste and heat it up to reduce the volume of garbage and extract small amounts of useful energy in the process.
Heating mixed waste (garbage) creates toxic air emissions and the toxicant-containing residual -- whether ash or a rock-like "clinker" -- will be buried in the ground where it remains available forever, threatening groundwater.
These new incinerators are never called "incinerators" -- they go by names like pyrolysis or gasification plants, or plasma arc melters, or simply "conversion" machines. But they all propose to heat mixed waste, extract some energy, and bury the leftovers in the ground.** The contribution of now-defunct incinerators to soil and water contamination is the subject of specific, multi-million dollar investigations in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Florida, California, and Ohio. And remember, this is just a review of news stories during a one-month period, October, 2006 (and the month isn't over yet).
Think about that. If garbage were defined as a "renewable energy resource," garbage incinerators would naturally become an official part of the nation's renewable energy strategy. This will be good for incinerator companies but bad for everyone else.
Burning garbage wastes huge amounts of energy because everything destroyed in an incinerator must be re-created from scratch starting with the mining and logging of virgin materials, transportation, processing, more transportation, and manufacture -- all accompanied by massive pollution and waste.
There can only be an endless supply of garbage if the U.S. maintains its wasteful lifestyle. When we get around to adopting a precautionary waste philosophy (zero waste), garbage will diminish dramatically. Incinerator companies that need garbage to feed their machines will oppose sensible solid waste policies by hook and by crook. We must therefore once again mount a serious campaign against them and their wasteful machines.
============== (via precaution.org)
Our thanks to Monica Wilson and Annie Leonard of GAIA for recent informative interviews about the resurgence of incineration in the U.S.
