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This year, the International Joint Commission (IJC) issued two important recommendations in response to growing evidence that organochlorine poisons are having epidemic effects on the health of people and wildlife in the Great Lakes: sunset the use of chlorine as a feed stock in industry, and phase out all incinerators or eliminate their emissions of the chlorine-based dioxins, furans, PCBs, and hydrochloric acid.[1]
The IJC's recommendations are timely, closely following new revelations of the severity of chlorine's twin threats to the ecosystem -- ozone depletion and persistent toxic contamination.
Chlorine has already begun to cause these disastrous alterations on a global scale, and the effects on the food chain, on reproduction md development, and on human health and disease are more severe than previously thought.[2]
The IJC's chlorine and incinerator recommendations are two sides of the same coin, a single policy that urges the United States and Canada towards clean production and a chlorine-free future. To stop organochlorine releases, incinerators must either stop burning organochlorines or simply shut down. But the industries that manufacture and use organochlorines rely on incinerators as the primary disposal route for their solvents, plastics, sludges and production wastes. Stopping organochlorine emissions from burners spells doom for both the incineration and chlorine industries.
Incinerators of all types -- commercial and on-site hazardous waste burners, cement kilns, and garbage and medical waste burners -- have become the number one disposal method for the chlorine industry's toxic wastes and products.
The industrial chlorine cycle begins when chemical giants such as Dow, Occidental, DuPont and ICI use huge amounts of energy to split salt molecules, producing chlorine gas and caustic soda. The North American chemical industry produces about 13 million tons of chlorine each year, one-third of the world's total.
About three-quarters of the chlorine produced is used within the chemical industry to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic, solvents, pesticides, refrigerants (e.g., the ozone-destroying CFCs and HCFCs), and other industrial and commercial chemicals. Most of the remainder is used for the bleaching of pulp and paper, and smaller amounts are used to disinfect sewage and drinking water and to produce certain metals.[3]
When the chemical industry combines chlorine and petroleum to make organochlorine products, huge amounts of waste are generated. For example, North American producers of vinyl chloride, the building block for PVC, generate about 320 million pounds of organochlorine waste annually. These "tars" contain such infamous poisons as carbon tetrachloride, hexachlorobenzene, and dioxins. About two-thirds of these tars are burned, and the remainder is redirected into production. In Europe, these wastes were burned in ocean incinerators until that practice was banned, prompting a rush to build land-based incinerators.
Commercial hazardous waste incinerators and cement kilns are the primary endpoint for organochlorine wastes generated by a broad range of industries, including everything from solvents and paints to manufacturing sludges and pesticide wastes. USEPA estimates that over 40 percent of the wastes fed to U.S. hazardous waste incinerators are organochlorines.[5]
Garbage incinerators are also major organochlorine burners, receiving large amounts of plastics, plus smaller amounts of chlorinated solvents, paints, and chlorine-bleached paper. The German government estimates that PVC accounts for 80 percent of the chlorine fed to garbage incinerators in that country.[6]
PVC is the lifeblood of the garbage incinerator industry, since it is highly flammable and the least recyclable of all plastics. Incineration is also a growing disposal trend for sludges from the pulp and paper industry and sewage treatment plants. These nutrient-rich sludges would be valuable fertilizers were they not contaminated with chlorinated poisons that render them useless and dangerous wastes.
Despite the high-tech rhetoric of "resource recovery" and "thermal detoxification", incineration of chlorinated wastes simply does not work. In fact, all incinerators convert a portion of the wastes they burn into poisons that are far more toxic and persistent than the original wastes, and emit this complex mixture of chemicals into the environment through air emissions ash residues, and waste water discharges.
All incinerators create new compounds out of partially burned fragments of the original chemicals. Even under "optimal" combustion conditions, random chemical reactions take place, producing thousands of new chemicals, called products of incomplete combustion (PICs). According to USEPA, only about 100 of the thousands of PICs known to be emitted have ever been identified in trial burns. The thousands of remaining mystery chemicals cannot be evaluated for their toxicity or environmental behavior.
Among the identified PICs in incinerator emissions, almost half are organochlorines, including the ultra-toxic dioxins, furans, PCBs, and hexachlorobenzene -- some of the most toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulative synthetic chemicals ever studied.[8] These chemicals have been found in the air emissions, ash, and water discharges of all types of incinerators burning chlorinated wastes -- including hazardous waste incinerators, cement kilns, garbage and medical waste incinerators, and sludge burners.
There is no known way to burn organochlorines and not create these ultra-toxic PICs.
USEPA's Science Advisory Board has written that as much as one percent of the total mass of compounds fed to hazardous waste incinerators is released to the environment unburned or as PICs.[9] On this basis and using the estimated average organochlorine content shown above, U.S. hazardous waste burners alone emit 22 million pounds of organochlorine contaminants into the air each year. Garbage and hospital and sludge incinerators add a large but unknown amount. Ash and effluent from all types of burners release an additional, and likely far greater, organochlorine burden.
Organochlorines are now distributed worldwide, even in the most remote reaches of the planet -- the deep oceans, Antarctica, and the tissues of polar bears and Inuit people living near the Arctic Circle. Hundreds of organochlorines have been identified in the body fat, breast milk, semen, and blood of the general population in the U.S. and Canada, including dioxins, PCBs, and hexachlorobenzene.[10]
Incinerators that burn chlorinated wastes have been identified as primary sources of global and local organochlorine contamination. Several European environmental agencies -- including those in Denmark and the Netherlands -- have concluded that incinerators are the number one source of dioxins and furans in their countries.[11] In England and the Netherlands, milk from cows grazing near hazardous waste incinerators has been prohibited due to high levels of dioxin and furan contamination.[12]
In North America the pattern of dioxins and furans in human tissues and in Great Lakes sediments closely matches the pattern in incinerator emissions. "Atmospheric transport of combustion derived particulates has made PCDD and PCDF [dioxins and furans] ubiquitous in the environment ... The most significant source of PCDD and PCDF into the atmosphere is probably the combustion of wastes that contain chlorinated compounds," according to one study.[13] "Combustion is the only source of sufficient size and ubiquity to account for the PCDD and PCDF in human adipose tissue," another concluded.[14]
Numerous studies have found that the most important factor affecting metal emissions from incinerators is the amount of chlorine in the waste. One USEPA study found that metals emissions were seven times higher when the chlorine content of the waste increased from zero to 8.3 percent. Chlorine also reduced the efficiency of the scrubber in removing metals from the stack gas.[15]
Metals emissions from cement kilns also increase when chlorinated wastes are burned. A recent trial burn at an Ohio cement kiln found that lead emissions were six times higher when chlorinated wastes were burned than when coal was the only fuel.[16] A USEPA study found that particulate emissions, a chronic problem at cement kilns, tripled when chlorinated wastes were burned.[17] Another study found that burning chlorinated wastes in cement kilns causes the build-up of particulates inside the kiln, leading to severe upset conditions that increase the emissions of PlCs and unburned chemicals.[18]
Burning chlorinated wastes in garbage incinerators increases the emission rates of metals for similar reasons. Also, because huge quantities of heavy metals are added to PVC as stabilizers, PVC is the major source of lead and cadmium in the municipal waste stream. In Germany, PVC incineration produces greater lead releases into the environment than leaded gasoline and is considered the main source of cadmium.[19]
The production and use of chlorine and chlorine-based chemicals feeds the incineration industry. Incinerators, in turn, sustain the chlorine industry.
In order to break this poison cycle, calls for ending oroganochlorine contamination must be coupled with calls for ending the incineration of chlorinated products and wastes and stopping the construction of all new incinerators.
As the IJC recommended, stopping further organochlorine pollution and its effects in the Great Lakes ecosystem ultimately means phasing out the industrial production and use of chlorine, rather than trying to control the thousands of products and byproducts emitted by the many industries that use it.
Phasing out a major sector of the powerful chemical industry will require a diverse social consensus to press for protection of the environment, communities, and workers. Communities that have been at the front lines of organochlorine contamination for years will have to play a lead role in this movement -- communities that have lived with and fought incinerators, pulp mills, chemical plants, pesticide contamination, and all the other tentacles of the chlorine industry.
Creating an international grassroots network to phase out the chlorine industry will help win each local struggle and move us towards the fundamental changes necessary to protect the global ecosystem. A chlorine-free network would bring people together under the new slogan, "Act Locally. Organise Globally."
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