The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [146]
But the main waste of resources is the garbage itself. Consider the lifecycle of Stuff as laid out in these pages—behind every piece of garbage is a long history, of extraction in mines, harvesting in forests or fields, production in factories, and extensive ferrying along supply chains. How ridiculous is it to lock up all those resources underground after spending all that effort to extract and make and distribute them in the first place! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the amount of resources on this planet is finite. We’re running out of them. Locking them up underground is just plain stupid.
Away by Fire
Incinerators are big machines that burn waste. Back in 1885, when the first one in the country was built on Governors Island in New York, it seemed like a good way to get rid of potato peels, chicken bones, and fabric scraps. Even then there were much better ways of dealing with those much more benign materials (compost, papermaking, soapmaking, etc.), but today we have no excuse: fire is not an appropriate method of trying to make garbage go “away,” especially since today’s trash contains Stuff like cell phones, VCRs, paint cans, PVC, and batteries.
There are many scientists, recyclers, activists, municipal officials, and others who are working against incinerators. You could fill a library with their reports as to why incineration is the wrong way to go. Here are my top ten reasons:
1. Incinerators Pollute
Incinerators liberate the toxics contained in products into the air. We breathe that air. Those airborne poisons can also easily drop into water. We drink that water and use it to irrigate our food. The poisons in the air also land on farms, fields, and the sea, moving up the food chain into the fish, meat, and dairy that we eventually eat. Even worse, burning trash creates new toxins that weren’t in the original waste. That is because the actual process of combustion takes apart and recombines chemicals into new supertoxins. Some of these combustion by-products are the most toxic man-made industrial pollutants known, like dioxin, for which incinerators are among the top sources globally.93 For example, if anything containing chlorine—clothes, paper, flooring, PVC, cleaning products—is burned, dioxin is created. Older and badly operated incinerators release toxins into both the air and into ash, while more advanced plants release toxins into the ash. In both cases, the toxins include chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects, damage to organs—especially the lungs and eyes—and endocrinological, neurological, circulatory, and reproductive problems.94 Meanwhile many of the toxins haven’t even been tested for health impacts.
2. Incinerators Don’t Eliminate the Need for Landfills
Incinerator pushers love to claim they make waste disappear, even bragging about their 99 percent destruction removal efficiency (DRE), which implies that 99 percent of the waste actually does disappear. But that’s not quite true: the waste is just converted to air pollution and ash. And guess what? That ash still needs to be landfilled. In general, for every 3 tons of waste one shoves into an incinerator, we get 1 ton of ash that requires landfilling.95 Waste isn’t destroyed in incinerators; its appearance just changes. Instead of a truckload of trash, we wind up with a slightly smaller pile of ash, plus pollution in the air, our lungs, and our food supplies.
Incinerator ash is more toxic than the original waste because the heavy metals (which are elements and can’t be destroyed) become concentrated. There are two kinds of ash: fly ash, which comes up the smokestack, and bottom ash, which piles up at the base of the combustion chamber. Fly ash is generally smaller in volume but way more toxic than bottom ash. In any case, some incinerator operators merge the two before they get landfilled.
And here’s the kicker: the more effective the filter atop the smokestack is, the more