The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [147]
3. Incinerators Violate the Principles of Environmental Justice
Incinerators fall into the category of dirty industrial development that I described in chapter 2 on production. Dirty development follows the path of least resistance, seeking out those communities that developers perceive to lack the economic, educational, or political resources to resist. That means incinerators get built in low-income communities and communities of color, forcing a disproportionate share of the resulting toxic pollution on the people who live there. Plus, not only does an incinerator create pollution directly from its smokestack, it also means heavy traffic from exhaust-spewing trucks that deliver and sometimes drop stinky, hazardous garbage.
4. Incinerators Are So 1980s
Is there any fashion from the 80s that is really worthy of a comeback? I don’t happen to think so, but definitely not incinerators. In the 1980s, proposals for municipal trash incinerators were all the rage in the United States. Ellen and Paul Connett, editors of the Waste Not newsletter, which tracked municipal waste incinerators for years, estimate that more than four hundred incinerators were proposed during the 1980s as their proponents went from community to community, touting the environmental benefits of burning trash and promising a techno-fix to the growing problem of waste.96 Most of these planned incinerators were stopped by informed organized community resistance. Those that were built were plagued with technical and financial problems, not to mention those billowing plumes of really noxious smoke and the inevitable ash.
Following these fiascos, the incinerator industry came to a virtual standstill in the United States for nearly twenty years, with no incinerator larger than those that burn 2,000 tons per day built since 1992.97 Meanwhile, the incinerator industry focused its attention overseas, on countries that were just getting on the disposables-consumption bandwagon. To the industry’s surprise, people there didn’t want them either! GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, boasts nearly one thousand members in eighty-one countries who share information and strategies and collaborate to stop incineration and promote sustainable solutions.98
When the incinerator industry realized the strength of the global resistance movement, they started putting fancy new names on slightly updated technology. The word “incineration” is hardly seen in today’s promotional material; instead these new facilities are called plasma arc, pyrolysis, gasification, and waste-to-energy plants. GAIA calls them “incinerators in disguise.”99 Don’t be fooled by the fancy packaging: they are still gigantic, expensive machines that burn garbage (aka resources) and that produce hazardous air pollution and ash.
5. Waste-to-Energy Plants Should Be Called Waste of Energy
The latest fashion among incinerator proponents is to call them waste-to-energy plants, promising to burn up all that stinky garbage and turn it into energy, even claiming that garbage is renewable energy and these monstrosities should get renewable energy credits! Since we have too much garbage and not enough energy, that sure sounds appealing. But here’s the deal: first off, the little bit of energy recovered from burning trash is a very dirty energy, releasing far more greenhouse gases than burning natural gas, oil, or even coal. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, waste incinerators produce 1,355 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour; coal produces 1,020, oil 758, and natural gas 515.100
Second, let’s step back and look at the grand scheme of things for a moment. When you burn