[enviro-vlc] China’s Incinerators Loom as a Global Hazard

[Vern Weitzel]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/business/energy-environment/12incinerate.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ref=global-home

August 12, 2009
China’s Incinerators Loom as a Global Hazard

By KEITH BRADSHER
SHENZHEN, China — In this sprawling metropolis in southeastern China stand two 
hulking brown buildings erected by a private company, the Longgang trash 
incinerators. They can be smelled a mile away and pour out so much dark smoke 
and hazardous chemicals that hundreds of local residents recently staged an 
all-day sit-in, demanding that the incinerators be cleaner and that a planned 
third incinerator not be built nearby.

After surpassing the United States as the world’s largest producer of household 
garbage, China has embarked on a vast program to build incinerators as landfills 
run out of space. But these incinerators have become a growing source of toxic 
emissions, from dioxin to mercury, that can damage the body’s nervous system.

And these pollutants, particularly long-lasting substances like dioxin and 
mercury, are dangerous not only in China, a growing body of atmospheric research 
based on satellite observations suggests. They float on air currents across the 
Pacific to American shores.

Chinese incinerators can be better. At the other end of Shenzhen from Longgang, 
no smoke is visible from the towering smokestack of the Baoan incinerator, built 
by a company owned by the municipal government. Government tests show that it 
emits virtually no dioxin and other pollutants.

But the Baoan incinerator cost 10 times as much as the Longgang incinerators, 
per ton of trash-burning capacity.

The difference between the Baoan and Longgang incinerators lies at the center of 
a growing controversy in China. Incinerators are being built to wildly different 
standards across the country and even across cities like Shenzhen. For years 
Chinese government regulators have discussed the need to impose tighter limits 
on emissions. But they have done nothing because of a bureaucratic turf war, a 
Chinese government official and Chinese incineration experts said.

The Chinese government is struggling to cope with the rapidly rising mountains 
of trash generated as the world’s most populated country has raced from poverty 
to rampant consumerism. Beijing officials warned in June that all of the city’s 
landfills would run out of space within five years.

The governments of several cities with especially affluent, well-educated 
citizens, including Beijing and Shanghai, are setting pollution standards as 
strict as Europe’s. Despite those standards, protests against planned 
incinerators broke out this spring in Beijing and Shanghai as well as Shenzhen.

Increasingly outspoken residents in big cities are deeply distrustful that 
incinerators will be built and operated to international standards. “It’s hard 
to say whether this standard will be reached — maybe the incinerator is designed 
to reach this benchmark, but how do we know it will be properly operated?” said 
Zhao Yong, a computer server engineer who has become a neighborhood activist in 
Beijing against plans for an incinerator there.

Yet far dirtier incinerators continue to be built in inland cities where 
residents have shown little awareness of pollution.

Studies at the University of Washington and the Argonne National Laboratory in 
Argonne, Ill., have estimated that a sixth of the mercury now falling on North 
American lakes comes from Asia, particularly China, mainly from coal-fired 
plants and smelters but also from incinerators. Pollution from incinerators also 
tends to be high in toxic metals like cadmium.

Incinerators play the most important role in emissions of dioxin. Little 
research has been done on dioxin crossing the Pacific. But analyses of similar 
chemicals have shown that they can travel very long distances.

A 2005 report from the World Bank warned that if China built incinerators 
rapidly and did not limit their emissions, worldwide atmospheric levels of 
dioxin could double. China has since slowed its construction of incinerators and 
limited their emissions somewhat, but the World Bank has yet to do a follow-up 
report.

Airborne dioxin is not the only problem from incinerators. The ash left over 
after combustion is laced with dioxin and other pollutants. Zhong Rigang, the 
chief engineer at the Baoan incinerator here, said that his operation sent its 
ash to a special landfill designed to cope with toxic waste. But an academic 
paper last year by Nie Yongfeng, a Tsinghua University professor and government 
adviser who sees a need for more incinerators, said that most municipal 
landfills for toxic waste lacked room for the ash, so the ash was dumped.

Trash incinerators have two advantages that have prompted Japan and much of 
Europe to embrace them: they occupy much less real estate than landfills, and 
the heat from burning trash can be used to generate electricity. The Baoan 
incinerator generates enough power to light 40,000 households.

And landfills have their own environmental hazards. Decay in landfills also 
releases large quantities of methane, a powerful global warming gas, said Robert 
McIlvaine, president of McIlvaine Company, an energy consulting firm that 
calculates the relative costs of addressing disparate environmental hazards. 
Methane from landfills is a far bigger problem in China than toxic pollutants 
from incinerators, particularly modern incinerators like those in Baoan, he said.

China’s national regulations still allow incinerators to emit 10 times as much 
dioxin as incinerators in the European Union; American standards are similar to 
those in Europe. Tightening of China’s national standards has been stuck for 
three years in a bureaucratic war between the environment ministry and the main 
economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, said a 
Beijing official who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to 
discuss the subject publicly.

The agencies agree that tighter standards on dioxin emissions are needed. They 
disagree on whether the environment ministry should have the power to stop 
incinerator projects that do not meet tighter standards, the official said, 
adding that the planning agency wants to retain the power to decide which 
projects go ahead.

Yan Jianhua, the director of the solid waste treatment expert group in Zhejiang 
province, a center of incinerator equipment manufacturing in China, defended the 
industry’s record on dioxin, saying that households that burn their trash 
outdoors emit far more dioxin.

“Open burning is a bigger problem according to our research,” Professor Yan 
said, adding that what China really needs is better trash collection so that 
garbage can be disposed of more reliably.

Critics and admirers of incinerators alike call for more recycling and reduced 
use of packaging as ways to reduce the daily volume of municipal garbage. Even 
when not recycled, sorted trash is easier for incinerators to burn cleanly, 
because the temperature in the furnace can be adjusted more precisely to 
minimize the formation of dioxin.

Yet the Chinese public has shown little enthusiasm for recycling. As Mr. Zhong, 
the engineer at the Baoan incinerator, put it, “No one really cares.”