Environmental Problems and Health Effects
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mp/2003/06/05/stories/2003060500930100.htm
It is a well-known fact that the extensive use of plastic carry bags, plastic cups etc destroys the environment. Burning plastic could release noxious gases that can equal any biochemical weapon. PVC, a common ingredient in plastic, is acknowledged to be carcinogenic.
http://www.lfpress.com/perl-bin/publish.cgi?x=articles&p=241987&s=societe
The environmental manager for St. Marys Cement admits it will be controversial, since burning plastic is usually considered an environmental danger.
“A cement kiln burns at 1,450 C — a temperature that destroys all organic materials completely,” said Vroegh.
Vroegh said the temperatures of the kiln’s exhaust gases would be controlled to prevent reformation of toxins such as dioxin and furans.
Dan McDermott, director of the Sierra Club Ontario, said he is “very suspicious” of claims that toxic materials can be completely eliminated by incineration.
“These things can become landfills in the sky,” he said.
McDermott said he does not have any specific research on incinerating plastic, but said the town of St. Marys should get independent verification of any claims made by the company.
“I would treat this kind of scheme as guilty until proven innocent,” said McDermott.
http://www.cleanairalliance.org/node/324
Currently, groups like the Association of Major Power Consumers in Ontario (AMPCO –e.g., Imperial Oil, St. Marys Cement, PetroCanada) have grabbed the government’s ear with their aggressive lobbying for subsidized, dirty power. We need to make sure the government hears an equally strong message from voters who don’t want to pay for AMPCO’s dirty power with lousy air quality and rapidly accelerating climate change.
http://plasticisrubbish.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/dioxins-why-you-dont-want-to-be-burning-plastic/
Dioxins are unintentionally, but unavoidably produced during the manufacture of materials containing chlorine, including PVC and other chlorinated plastic feedstocks.
Burning these plastics can release dioxins.
Dioxin is a known human carcinogen and the most potent synthetic carcinogen ever tested in laboratory animals. A characterization by the National Institute of Standards and Technology of cancer causing potential evaluated dioxin as over 10,000 times more potent than the next highest chemical (diethanol amine), half a million times more than arsenic and a million or more times greater than all others.
Burning Plastic Raises a Stink
THE plastics industry is coming under increasingly determined fire worldwide for claiming that incinerating its products does not significantly increase emissions of the deadly chemical dioxin.
In a new report timed to spearhead a campaign to ban the production of PVC, the US arm of the international environmental group Greenpeace rejects the industry’s assertion that there is no correlation between the quantity of chlorine from plastics burnt in incinerators and their emissions of dioxin. And a leading member of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) scientific advisory panel on dioxin backs Greenpeace’s conclusions.
Dioxin is a toxic organic chemical that contains chlorine. It is produced when chlorine and hydrocarbons are burnt at high temperatures. The biggest source of chlorine in incinerated waste is PVC, a hydrocarbon that also contains chlorine. This has led many scientists to argue that it is the main culprit in causing dioxin emissions from incinerators.
http://www.texascenter.org/publications/kiln.htm
Cement Production and Conventional Environmental Problems
Traditional cement production can cause environmental problems: the continual extraction and mining of limestone and other materials leaves large scars in the earth; inadequate transportation of extracted materials for grinding and storage in the plant produces a tremendous amount of dust. As in any combustion process, the calcination process in the kiln produces air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. The amount depends on the type of fuel, air pollution control equipment and parameters of the kiln’s operation. The left-over cement kiln dust can be contaminated with heavy metals and other pollutants. If the cement kiln dust is deposited back in the quarries from which the limestone was extracted, or to a municipal landfill, it can contaminate soils, groundwater and flood waters.
Exposure to carbon monoxide negatively impacts the central nervous system and, along with nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and suspended particulate matter, irritates the lung tissue and the respiratory system and aggravates the symptoms of people with lung diseases (asthma, chronic bronchitis). Exposure to these contaminants can also increase cardiac and other circulatory problems as well as acute respiratory sicknesses.
What environmental problems and health effects can happen when hazardous waste is used as the fuel in the cement-making process?
*The amount and types of air contaminants — including carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter — increase, more so than with the burning of coal, petroleum or natural gas.
*Higher levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury, and 15 other heavy metals commonly found in cement kiln air emissions, occur when hazardous wastes are burned.
*New contaminants, known as Products of Incomplete Combustion (PICs), are produced, including highly-toxic dioxins and furans, in the stack emissions.
*The cement kiln dust, the clinker, and the cement itself can contain these heavy metals (cadmium, chromium, arsenic, lead and selenium for example) as well as the PICs.
*There is a higher risk of accidents in the transport of hazardous wastes to the plants.
*Workers at the cement plants are exposed to hazardous wastes, increasing their health risks.
The exposure to heavy metals can provoke serious health effects. The exposure of a pregnant woman to lead can cause development problems in the fetus and affect the neurological development of the child, including its future intelligence; exposure to cadmium can affect the kidney, liver and lungs, cause genetic damage and has been proven to cause cancer in rats; mercury exposure at high concentrations can cause permanent damage to the brain, the kidneys and to fetuses in development; the nervous system is especially sensitive to the effects of mercury, provoking more severe disorders with increases in exposures (irritability, nervousness, trembling, vision and hearing changes, memory problems). Other suspected or known carcinogens emitted by rotating kilns include berilium and hexavalent chromium.
What opposition has the practice of incinerating hazardous wastes in cement kilns generated in other countries?
National health associations — such as the American Lung Association — have opposed burning hazardous wastes in cement kilns and have produced video testimonials about the health problems that this practice provokes in the local population.
Are there any alternatives?
The alternative to burning hazardous wastes in the making of cement is simple: require the use of less contaminating fuels such as fuel oils or the least contaminating alternative, natural gas.
The huge underutilization of natural gas produced by Pemex, the privatization of the delivery of natural gas in Mexico and the tendency toward price reductions offer greater opportunities for Mexican cement plants to take advantage of natural gas.
http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/CBNS/dxnsum.html
The Dioxin Problem
- Our daily intake of dioxin and dioxin-like chemicals creates a lifetime cancer risk in the general U.S. population that is 500-1,000 times greater than the “acceptable” one in a million risk. In pregnant women long-term damage to the fetus may also occur close to this level of exposure, leading to birth defects, disrupted sexual development, and damage to the nervous and immune systems. By any reasonable standard, this means that we must eliminate exposure to dioxin.
- Nearly all of the general population’s exposure to dioxin comes from food — two-thirds of it from milk, dairy products and beef, major components of the diet. For their part, milk cows and beef cattle absorb dioxin by eating dioxin-contaminated feed crops. Since we cannot readily eliminate these foods, action must be taken to prevent the contamination of the feed crops by dioxin.
- Dioxin enters the environment chiefly in the form of airborne emissions from incinerators, particularly those that burn municipal and medical waste. The EPA dioxin reassessment proposed, as a hypothesis, that once emitted, dioxin is carried in the air to farms where it is deposited on the crops fed to milk cows and beef cattle. Since there is no way to shield crops from dioxin deposited on them from the air, or to later remove it, action to prevent crop contamination must be directed at the sources that produce dioxin, such as incinerators.
A typical assessment worked out the maximum cancer risk to a person breathing dioxin-contaminated air at a point downwind of an incinerator where the ground-level concentration of dioxin is greatest.
The International Joint Commission (IJC) has concluded that only the strategy of pollution prevention can end the toxic threat to the Great Lakes. Present efforts to remedy the environmental impact of toxic pollutants — including the most recently proposed EPA regulations of incinerator emissions — are almost entirely based on the strategy of control: a device is appended to the source with the aim of recapturing enough of the pollutant to bring the environmental emissions to some presumably acceptable level. The IJC strategy calls for a different approach. Since the goal of prevention is to completely eliminate the pollutant — which experience shows is unattainable through control devices — this must be achieved by transforming the process that actually generates the pollutant so that it is not produced to begin with. This can be done, for example, by recycling municipal waste instead of burning it.
Our study also shows that the major sources of the dioxin deposited in the Great Lakes, in particular the incinerators that burn municipal or medical waste, can be replaced by dioxin-free waste-disposal procedures with little or no loss in economic activity or jobs — and even with possible gains.
The amounts of dioxin different sources produce vary a great deal; but what they all have in common is combustion — fuel is burned — and the presence of chlorine in the fuel. Trash-burning incinerators have been studied most, and we now know that they literally synthesize dioxin by chemical reactions as combustion gases cool down in their control devices or exhaust stacks. There, chlorine (released, for example, from the burning of chlorinated plastics) and organic (carbon-containing) molecules that survive combustion combine to produce dioxin.
Instead, a sample of the stack gas must be trapped and sent to a laboratory for an elaborate and expensive (about $1000 per sample) analysis. Very few of the many sources have ever been analyzed for dioxin, and even those are tested only infrequently.
The EPA and other environmental agencies have used the “emission-factor” approach to get around this problem. Measurements are made at a few — hopefully typical — trash-burning incinerators, let us say, recording not only the amount of dioxin emitted from the stacks, under standard (again hopefully) operating conditions, but also connecting that amount to the amount of trash burned. An emission factor — the amount of dioxin emitted per ton of trash burned — can then be calculated. Finally the amount of dioxin emitted by an untested incinerator can be estimated by multiplying the amount of waste it burns (the “throughput”) by the appropriate emission factor.
There are difficulties with this approach, for the amount of dioxin emitted depends, not only on the amount of material burned, but on a number of other factors as well, including: the nature of the fuel (especially its chlorine content); the design of the incinerator; and the type of emission control device. The largest — and often unknown — variable is the nature of the fuel. For example, two measurements of dioxin emissions from a Columbus, Ohio municipal waste incinerator (now closed) differed by a factor of five, apparently because of a difference in the composition of the trash burned on the two occasions.
Should the community build an incinerator that would expose the people of the community, themselves, to this hazard? Since, in this case, the risk would be self-imposed, the community at risk, through its elected officials, could decide whether or not to accept it.
We have also learned more about the dioxin “background” problem. This goes back to claims made some 20 years ago in reports from the Dow Chemical Company that dioxin occurs throughout the environment because it is created by widespread natural processes such as forest fires, and not by industrial processes and products. That idea was laid to rest when studies of dated lake sediments showed that almost no dioxin was present until the 1940s, and then rose sharply in parallel with the use of chlorine by the petrochemical industry. Nevertheless, in some quarters the idea persists that the widespread occurrence of background levels of dioxin is an unavoidable situation that we have to live with. And it is sometimes argued that since the output of dioxin from any one source does not add significantly to the background level, it can be “safely” operated. We now know that the chief contribution of each source to the hazard of airborne dioxin is, in fact, made by adding to the general level of background dioxin — the widespread fallout — and that this dangerous impact on the food supply is not “natural” but man-made.
Another useful outcome of our study has been the identification of serious gaps and inadequacies in the basic information about airborne emissions of dioxin. Only an extremely small fraction of the operating incinerators and other sources have ever been tested for dioxin emissions, forcing reliance on emission factors, which are themselves uncertain.
In pollution control, the source that generates the pollutant remains unchanged, but a separate control device is attached to trap or destroy the pollutant before it escapes into the environment. The source continues to produce the pollutant, but now a lesser amount — which is never zero — reaches the environment.
Unlike pollution control, prevention calls for changing the technology of the production process in which the pollutant originates, so that the source no longer produces it at all. Automatically, emissions are then zero.
In practice, combustion is never 100% efficient; some fraction — which may be very small– of the original organic fuel will survive.
Incinerator manufacturers claimed that a well-run incinerator would destroy all of the dioxin in the trash and that its presence in emissions was only a sign that the furnace was not hot enough or otherwise malfunctioning. However, a CBNS analysis showed that the amounts of dioxin emitted by different incinerators was not related to their operating temperatures. In 1984, seeking a better explanation, we suggested the possibility that in the cooler parts of the incinerator, surviving fragments of chlorine-free organic compounds in the fuel might combine with chlorine (which is released, for example, when chlorine-containing plastics burn) and produce newly formed dioxin. Within a year this idea was tested in a Canadian incinerator. Dioxin was measured in the fuel (trash), the hot gas leaving the furnace, and the relatively cool gas at the base of the stack. The amount of dioxin at the base of the stack was 100 times the amount leaving the furnace, and much more than the amount in the fuel. We now know that a trash-burning incinerator produces dioxin; whenever the incinerator operates, the world has more dioxin than it had before.
Cement kilns that burn hazardous waste:
As of 1993 there were 28 cement kilns in the United States and two in Canada that burned hazardous waste. Of these, 9 facilities were located in the Great Lakes states and the province of Ontario. They accounted for 7% of the U.S. cement production and 12% of the Canadian production.
Cement kilns are designed to manufacture cement by heating a mixture of raw materials to temperatures in the range of 1400o-1500oC. For that reason, and because of the large amount of material involved, cement production uses a great deal of fuel, generally in the form of natural gas, fuel oil, coal, or coke. The kilns are usually designed to switch fuels easily in response to fluctuating prices. Hazardous chemical waste is massively produced by the petrochemical industry; it is burnable, and cement kilns have been allowed to use it as a substitute fuel. Hazardous waste frequently contains chlorinated organic compounds, including dioxin, and for the reasons discussed above, when it is burned dioxin will appear in the emissions as either surviving or newly synthesized material.
The dioxin-free alternative technology:
The dioxin-free alternative is quite straightforward: the kiln returns to burning a conventional fuel instead of burning hazardous waste.
The economic consequences:
The generation of dioxin by cement kilns that burn hazardous waste can be eliminated by the simple expedient of switching back to their normal fuels: coal, coke, oil, or natural gas. Since the kilns are already equipped to handle these solid, liquid or gaseous fuels, no capital costs are involved in this transition. The transition will, however, affect employment and the cost of operation and maintenance — in particular, the cost of fuel.
If hazardous waste is replaced with a normal fuel, instead of receiving a tip fee for disposing of the waste (which in 1993 amounted to $68 million), the 9 cement kilns in the Great Lakes region would then pay for the normal fuel (about $9 million per year). This amounts to an increase in their cement production costs of approximately $77 million. At the same time, the transition results in a payroll savings of $11 million, since the additional employees that handle the hazardous material are no longer needed. Finally, if they stopped burning hazardous waste, the kilns could avoid (a) the operation and maintenance cost incident to burning hazardous waste, and (b) the cost of installing the control devices needed to meet the new regulations for dioxin emissions that have just been proposed (April 1996). The cost of burning hazardous waste amounts to roughly $85 per ton of hazardous waste burned, a total of $32 million for the 9 Great Lakes cement kilns burning hazardous waste. According to an EPA-sponsored study, these costs, for improving dioxin emission control equipment in keeping with the proposed regulations, would amount to $19.1 million for the 9 Great Lakes cement kilns.
An important but poorly evaluated economic factor relates to recent changes in the supply of hazardous waste and the capacity to burn it. A recent analysis concludes that commercial incinerators and cement kilns burning hazardous waste are currently operating at only 60-80% of their capacity to burn such wastes. As a result, there is now intense competition for the relatively short supply of hazardous waste among cement kilns and commercial incinerators, which tends to reduce the fees that they can charge. Thus, a recent account of the incinerator industry’s objections to the secrecy of current EPA discussions with the cement industry points out that “[T]he controversy comes down to the competition between some cement makers and incinerator operators for a shrinking supply of hazardous waste to burn.”
These developments suggest that the added income that cement kilns enjoy by burning hazardous waste instead of normal fuel is likely to be less than our present estimate indicates. This is especially true because, on top of the over-capacity, the supply of hazardous waste is declining, the result of the environmentally motivated campaign in the chemical industry to reduce the generation of such wastes.
Conclusions:
Despite the absence, thus far, of the data needed for a complete analysis of the economic impact of requiring cement kilns to burn normal fuels rather than hazardous waste, it would appear that there will be little or no economic barrier to this transition — a change that would eliminate this source of the dioxin now entering the Great Lakes. Indeed, the industry itself provides persuasive evidence that it is economically feasible to produce cement without burning hazardous waste. More than three-fourths of the cement is produced, quite successfully, without burning hazardous waste.
We venture, therefore, to recommend that the Great Lakes states and Ontario — and indeed the U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies as a whole — develop regulations that end the practice of burning hazardous waste in cement kilns. As experience shows, this change will not take place in the absence of public pressure. The fact that cement is extensively used in public construction, and that it may be contaminated with dioxin and other toxic pollutants if it includes ash from the combustion of hazardous waste, creates an opportunity to exert such pressure. For example, in 1991 the City of Fort Collins, Colorado, on environmental grounds, passed a resolution against a local cement company’s plan to burn hazardous waste in its kiln– a customary form of complaint. But the Council added a more persuasive argument when it outlawed the use of cement from kilns burning hazardous waste on any City-funded projects.
There is an interesting, if ironic, footnote to the history of these relations among the public, regulatory agencies, and industry. For a long time EPA’s regulatory approach has been governed by the strategy of pollution control, which — despite recent proclamations about the importance of pollution prevention — continues to dominate the Agency’s regulatory efforts. However, pollution control is economically unproductive; as standards become more strict, the marginal cost of implementing them rises very rapidly. This gives rise to a dynamic interplay among three forces that influence environmental policy: the public’s pressure for improved environmental quality; EPA’s tendency to respond — when it does — by imposing stricter control-based standards; and the industries’ reaction to the resulting increase in environmental costs, which induces them to recognize the economic advantages of pollution prevention over control.
http://downwindersatriskarticles.blogspot.com/
Over the past year, several cities including Fort Worth, Arlington and Dallas have passed resolutions calling for the purchase of only “green” cement from less-polluting plants.
http://www.zender-engr.net/docs/health_effects_burning_trash.pdf
Acute effects from burning some wastes can be very serious. It takes only five ounces of burning PVC to give off enough hydrogen chloride gas to kill someone in an average-size room in just ten minutes.
Children can be at much greater risk. Because of their body size, they inhale more air per pound of body mass than do adults, and can absorb a proportionately larger “dose” of toxins. Also, children’s bodies are more susceptible to damage from the mercury, lead, cadmium and other heavy metals found in the smoke because their nervous systems are not fully developed.
Dioxin is one of the most hazardous chemical compounds to breathe and it causes cancer. It is almost always formed when burning garbage. Temperatures of 600° to 1200 ° will form the most dioxin, and at over 1800° very little is formed.
One of the highest sources of chlorine is PVC. It is 56% chlorine. Some studies show that the amount of PVC in waste is the most important predictor of dioxin emissions. PVC also forms hydrochloric acid which is a major irritant to eyes and lungs, and potentially lethal.
PVC – Polyvinyl chloride forms dioxins when burned and hydrochloric acid. It may contribute to dioxin formation from other wastes because it has so much chlorine. The more chlorine a dioxin, furan, or PCB has, the more toxic its effects.
Hydrochloric acid can irritate and burn your lungs and cause fluid build up and possible ulceration of your respiratory tract. Dioxin can cause cancer, immune dysfunction, IQ deficit, reproductive effects, and much more. Don’t burn it.
Stop Plastic Fuel 