=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #162
—January 3, 1990—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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FINE PARTICLES–PART 5: INCINERATION WORSENS LANDFILL HAZARDS.
Eighty percent of America’s solid waste is buried in
landfills–160 million tons of it each year. In the U.S., we
currently have about 5,500 operating solid waste landfills.
After Love Canal made headlines in 1978, citizen groups began to
focus their attention on the hazards of landfills; as opposition
to new landfills mounted, some government agencies decided
incineration was the best solution to the nation’s garbage
problem. The thinking went this way: landfills pollute
groundwater and get citizens all steamed up; incinerators reduce
the need for landfills; therefore incinerators make sense as a
way of handling garbage.
Throughout the 1980s, however, evidence accumulated, indicating
that incinerators make the landfill problem worse, not better.
Incinerators do reduce the amount of material that must be
landfilled. If you put 1000 pounds of raw garbage into a solid
waste incinerator, you end up with somewhere between 250 and 400
pounds of ash; the other 600 to 750 pounds has been released into
the environment as gases and soot through the smoke stack. The
reduction in volume (as distinct from weight) is even more
dramatic; for every 1000 cubic feet of garbage entering an
incinerator, only 100 to 300 cubic feet remain as ash. Thus an
incinerator reduces the need for landfill space (volume), which
initially makes incinerators seem beneficial. [The reduction of
total waste volume is less than the 70% to 90% indicated here
because many items, like building debris, old refrigerators, etc.
are not candidates for incineration, so building an incinerator
does not affect the need for landfill space to contain them.]
Incinerators do reduce the need for landfill space, but
unfortunately they also increase the hazards of the material
going into the landfill and therefore actually make the
groundwater pollution problem worse. As this fact becomes more
widely understood, citizens are focusing their opposition on
landfills that accept ash from incinerators, thus making the
political problems of solid waste disposal as bad as, or worse
than, they were before incineration was proposed.
The key here is the physical change that occurs in the garbage as
it passes through the incinerator. Garbage starts off composed of
fairly large items (cardboard boxes, bread wrappers, newspapers,
and so forth). Inside the combustion chamber, the garbage is
broken down and transformed into billions upon billions of small
pieces, called ash. We have written earlier (see RHWN #131, #132, #134, #136)
about the important change that occurs with this
transformation: the surface area of the garbage is greatly
increased. Because a small item has a larger surface area,
relative to its volume, than does a larger item, the effect of
breaking garbage into small particles is to vastly increase its
surface area.
For example, as we showed in RHWN #131 [revised], a one-pound
lump of garbage (assuming it has a spherical shape and weighs the
same as water) has a surface area of about 44 square inches
-about the size of a large post card. However, if you break that
pound of garbage into tiny particles, you will increase its
surface area to 9900 square yards-about the area of two football
fields.
This is important when you put incinerator ash into the ground,
because items in contact with groundwater leach from their
surface. The larger the surface area, the faster leaching can
occur. Everyone knows this from their own experience. Think of a
drip coffee maker. If you put coffee beans into a drip coffee
maker without grinding them up, then pour hot water over them,
you will get very weak, unsatisfactory coffee out the bottom.
However, if you grind up the coffee beans (thus greatly
increasing the surface area of the coffee beans, thus increasing
the ability of water to contact the beans), you will get thick,
dark, rich coffee out the bottom. The grinding has not changed
the weight of the beans, but it has exposed more of the beans to
the water. The same thing happens with landfill leachate as with
coffee: “grinding up” the garbage (turning it into ash) by
processing it inside an incinerator vastly increases the surface
area of the garbage and thus makes it leach much more rapidly.
What you get out the bottom is not a thin, weak leachate but a
rich, strong leachate that is more toxic than the leachate would
have been if you had leached raw garbage instead of ash.
What are the toxic components in leachate from ash? The principal
toxic components are the heavy metals that were present in the
original garbage. Although you have reduced the weight of the
garbage (each 1000 pounds going in produces only 250 to 400
pounds of ash), you still have most of the heavy metals from the
original garbage, only now they are in the ash. Because the
incineration process has driven off non-metallic components, the
heavy metals now represent a greater proportion of the waste than
they originally did (in other words, their concentration has
increased) and they are now in a much more leachable form because
their surface area has vastly increased. Thus, an ash landfill
associated with an incinerator is much more likely to contaminate
groundwater with toxic heavy metals than is a landfill that
accepts only raw garbage.
There are few ash landfills in operation today. Most people who
operate incinerators are throwing the ash into municipal
landfills, or are simply heaping it on the ground somewhere. The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has refused to take a
position on whether incinerator ash is a “hazardous waste” as
defined by the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or
not.
However, there is ample reason to be concerned about the hazards
of metals in landfill ash. Studies at Rutgers University (see
RHWN #92) have shown that each ton of incinerator ash contains
approximately 5.9 pounds of lead, 0.12 pounds of cadmium, 0.096
pounds of chromium, and 0.19 pounds of arsenic. The nation’s 100
operating solid waste incinerators are, today, processing
something like 45,000 tons of garbage per day, thus producing
perhaps 14,600 tons of ash each day or 5.3 million tons of ash
each year. Those 5.3 million tons of ash contain 31 million
pounds of lead, 640 thousand pounds of cadmium, half a million
pounds of chromium, and a million pounds of arsenic. Burying this
material in shallow holes in the ground in rapidly leachable form
is essentially guaranteed to create the next generation of
Superfund sites.
Do ash landfills leach metals in toxic concentrations? In their
excellent new book on incineration, WAR ON WASTE, Louis Blumberg
and Robert Gottlieb report on an EPA study of three ash landfills
(so-called ashfills or ash monofills): “The drinking water
standard for lead was exceeded in eight of nine tests, and the
average value at the three sites exceeded the lead standard [for
drinking water] twelve-fold.” They go on to say, “Another review
of a New York State ashfill, monitored during its first year of
operation, when leachate should be considerably lower than in
future years, found that pollutant levels in the leachate already
exceeded, in some cases dramatically, a number of drinking water
standards for various substances.” (Blumberg & Gottlieb, pg. 114)
The acidity (or alkalinity) of the ash can affect the rate at
which metals leach out of it. Some companies add lime or other
materials to the ash to reduce the rate at which it releases
metals; this allows their ash to pass the EPA’s “EP toxicity
test” and thus avoids its designation as a “hazardous waste.”
This, however, merely demonstrates that the EP toxicity test is
not the proper test for evaluating the hazard of these wastes.
Since it is universally recognized that sooner or later all
landfills will leak, and since metals never degrade, over the
long haul it seems a certainty that toxic metals in
finely-divided form (i.e., in the form of small ash particles) in
shallow burial sites will contaminate the local environment.
Get: Louis Blumberg and Robert Gottlieb, WAR ON WASTE
(Washington, DC: Island Press [1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite
300, Washington, DC 20009; phone (202) 232-7933], 1989); $19.95.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: landfilling; leachate; toxic heavy metals;
incineration; ash; lead; cadmium; tclp; ep toxicity test;
hazardous waste definitions;