The anti-growth, status quo defender or skeptical "trash talking" reader might challenge my hypothesis, but the reality is that incineration has been giving a bad rap by undereducated people, "hardcore eco-groupies" and the Greens environmentalists who rely on paradigms, myths and metaphors.

The best way to recognize a myth is to put yourself into a world in which it's not believed. For example; every grass root reformer will tell you that industrial business emissions are causing global warming; but ask any anti what industrial business emissions were responsible for melting the ice that covered Canada during the ice age 10,000 years ago?

Global warming is real, not a "myth;" and it has been real since time began, but industrial business nor humanity is responsible for global warming. "Regional warming" and "global dimming" maybe, but not global warming. Earth has experienced 16 ice ages in the past 4.5 billion years and humanity was not responsible for any of these global warming and global cooling periods, since man didn't exist; a fact everyone seems to ignore.

Environmentalists have traditionally been hostile towards business and much environmental argument is characterized as anti-growth, anti-business, and anti-profit. Responses to environmental concerns is often been portrayed as imposing a brake upon development and innovation, thus increasing business costs and undermining competitiveness, jobs and living standards.

Sudbury has 161,000 citizens, a 5% unemployment rate, upwards of 8,000 on welfare, thousands on disability, over 13,000 using a food bank, and 60% of the workers make less than 10 $ a hour. Meeting the dual demands of smart growth and lower taxes hinges on generating "virgin revenue" sources, and making Sudbury more multifaceted in the "tech and non-tech economies" is the key to unlocking a more prosperous era and the formula for retaining our youth and professionals.

This is not to suggest that I am unsympathetic to environmental concerns, because I am; I am an amateur environmentalist, and this is an "eco-efficient ”Green Friendly” industrial business" that I wish to champion for our city, province and country. I would love nothing more than to put all land-hogging raw waste landfills out of business by "starving them to death."

Quite frankly we're in the “Stone Age” when it comes to waste management. We don’t put garbage in the lakes because it’s not a good idea. Putting garbage in the land so nasty chemicals can seep into the groundwater then enter our lakes while methane gas emissions emerge from landfills is not a good idea either.

How much prime land has been permanently poisoned by landfills is unknown. Worse may be where the seepage runoff is ending up. That we do know. Virtually all of it eventually flows into the lakes from which we draw our drinking water. Why would any one question such an obvious politically correct solution?

People often refer to incineration as a source of dioxins, and they're right. But let's put things in perspective. In Sweden there are 30 incineration plants; and the total amount of dioxins released this year is 0.7 of a gram. And that's for the entire country. And if the anti’s did some honest research they would also discover that European Union emission standards are much more stringent than anything we have in Canada. In addition, the EU and local governments levy heavy taxes on landfill to discourage exactly the kind of approach Canada advocates.

Dioxin is a carcinogen and one of the most toxic chemicals known, even at trace levels, or so the anti's say. However, you can be exposed to dioxin many ways, from a wood stove or even while you’re standing over a camp fire roasting a wiener or marshmallow. Dioxins also exist in nature as a result of coal and MSW combustion, metal production, natural forest fires and volcanoes activities.

Waste to Energy emissions produce less dioxin than a cement kiln, pulp and paper plant, metal smelting operation (i.e., Inco Xstrata), the incineration of medical waste, and a residential wood burning stove. In fact, WtE plants produces less posion than city council pumps out every second Wednesday.

It should be noted that even when dioxin emissions were ten times higher than they are now, there has not been a single recording of a person becoming ill or dying from dioxin poisoning in North America.

Apart form the Seveso (Italy) industrial chemical accident and the allegations regarding the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, the only reported case of dioxin poisoning was recently when an undetermined quantity of dioxins was mixed in the food of Mr. Yushchenko, the current President of Ukraine. He has survived this attack.

Another argument against incineration is expense. Building one burner would cost lots, perhaps $300 million. But what they fail to understand is that WtE plants generate heat and electricity, both of which can be sold to consumers to make money.

The operations in Sweden actually turn a profit. The break-even point is 10 to 20 years. Building products made from recycled materials reduce solid waste problems, cut energy consumption in manufacturing and save on natural resource use. The science of reuse is solid.

People also complain that incineration discourages recycling. This is complete nonsense; as there's no evidence that people reduce, reuse or recycle any less because of incineration than they do because of landfills. Indeed, both Swedes and Canadians recycle approximately 40% of household waste. In Canada, the remaining 60% goes into the ground; in Sweden, it's burned--for profit. Talk about waste!

Sometimes the opposition to incinerators becomes just pure hysteria, you know, the “devil burns and the Lord recycles.” What a load of "Rubbish!" In Greek mythology, fire was a gift of the Gods! Thanks to the “world’s window on waste” we now know that investment into waste management technologies that are safe, clean, ”Green” and run on its own generated renewable energy is the way forward to a more sustainable environment while protecting public health.

Those who stir up people and create all this fear just didn’t understand the technology. Objections to it are based on information that's 30 years out of date. These incinerators have been "laboratory pilot tested," "internationally patented," "scientifically baptized," and safely used throughout the world for over 35 years; so the force of logic prevails.

Incinerator inefficiencies are simply rich in myth and its slippery Canadian ally, tradition. Some people say incinerators are a "cash-burning plant," or a "waste-of-energy" facility not a "waste-to-energy" facility; however, many cities and countries have been busy proving the skeptical hardcore eco-groupies wrong.

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in Sweden

One of the most abused aspects of incinerators use by skeptics is that the air will become a cesspit like atmosphere; but myths are not basis for policy and a good dose of reality might be better.

The air shed does not have a border and incinerators within our air zone are used in Montreal, Brampton, Kirkland Lake, Michigan, New York State, Maine, Connecticut, Virginia, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maryland, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Rhode Island, Delaware and Minnesota; so the "inconvenient truth" for anti's is that incinerator emissions do not require a pssport to enter our airspace and emissions are already in the "great aerial ocean" that surrounds us all.

Minneapolis St. Paul Minnesota has 1000 lakes and no side effects from their incinerator, thus, incinerators have proven their "Green Credentials."

Hamilton Ontario used an incinerator until recently and now has a major odour problem coming from their landfill. Energy recovery from "landfill to energy" scheme produces only one fifth of the energy per tonne of waste than incineration with energy recovery. Energy from Landfills schemes do not achieve volume reduction of waste; incineration does. It also takes 25 years or more to recover "only some" of the methane from a landfill site, whereas the energy from incineration is recovered immediately.

Moreover, the mercury and dioxin standards for WtE plants are far more stringent than those for coal-fired or high-sulfur-content oil-fired power plants, and both coal and oil-fired plants are everywhere in the U.S.; and their emissions are already in our air shed. The U.S. projects that $35 billion will be spent to construct new municipal incinerators over the next ten years.

Importantly, every major city in Ontario, and elsewhere, already cremates humans, pets and medical waste and no one is calling for a ban. One quarter of the toxic emissions causing global warming derive from the transportation sector and cars are doing more damage than business, and no one is calling for a ban on cars.

Information failure is causing needless unemployment and mistakes in scientific assessment have played a major role in the collapse of some potentially sustainable harvesting systems. For example, when Canada took over the extended fish stock management of the 200-mile fishing jurisdiction off the East Coast in the 1977 "scientists" overestimated the remaining cod stocks off Newfoundland by over 200%. This led to a Canadian policy that virtually destroyed the cod stock by 1991.

In the past century, without much thought about the consequences, we have removed from the sea literally billions of tonnes of living creatures of wildlife and added to it billions of tonnes of toxic substances. We have a hard time thinking of fish as valuable unless they're dead and our accounting system regards these things as free. True, too, for our sacred land and trees that we are poisoning with landfills.

There is no monitoring or prevention method occurring to stop the seepage of other nasty cocktail of chemical liquids and heavy metals, like mercury, that are right now leaking and contaminating the surrounding environment, such as our groundwater system. This is called a non-point source pollutant. Landfill seepage can pollute ground water for up to 100 years and this chemical cocktail soup is seeping swiftly south, i.e., underground; sight unseen.

Mercury is a metal that occurs naturally in the environment in several forms. The most common form, metallic or elemental, is a silvery, odorless liquid. That is the form commonly found in household thermometers. Elemental mercury can evaporate at room temperature to form a vapor. Mercury can escape to the environment when items containing mercury are broken or thrown away. Whether the items are dumped in sewers, garbage cans or burned, some of the mercury will eventually enter the atmosphere.

Mercury is a pollutant in the air emissions from activities such as burning coal. A number of other possible sources of mercury exist, including cement plants and gasoline combustion and in many consumer products and devices. Mercury can also combine with other elements to form both inorganic and organic compounds. Mercury and mercury compounds can be found in air, soil and water.

Exposure to high levels of metallic, inorganic or organic mercury can damage the nervous system and kidneys. Studies have shown that people who ate fish and grain which contained large amounts of methylmercury had permanent damage to the nervous system and kidneys. Exposure to methylmercury is more of a concern for children and unborn babies because their nervous systems are still developing and the nervous system is a target organ for mercury. Health effects might include brain damage, behavioral and developmental problems. Mercury is extremely dangerous and it is right now seeping into our groundwater in over 10,000 landfills in Canada!

The atmosphere can absorb and cleanse itself of Greenhouse Gases, as history has proven, but our watersheds are not self-cleansing, thus we will save our world by saving our watersheds.

Landfill emissions are not being monitored and by eliminating materials from going into landfills we would eliminate future landfill methane gas emissions. Eliminating landfills would also reduce smell, flies, seagulls, rats, bears and disease. Land filling should be limited only to non-recyclable and non-combustible materials, as it does not make any sense to destroy sacred lands with garbage, and therefore; it's time to clean up our logic.

Interestingly, without some greenhouse gases in our atmosphere the surface of the earth would be about 30 degrees Celsius cooler than it is today, making human life impossible, thus trace amounts of greenhouse gases serve to raise the temperature of the earth’s surface and make it habitable. With absolutely no greenhouse gas earth would return to a cosmic snowball, thus, GHG in our atmosphere is the very reason life on earth exists.

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in Japan

Greater emphasis is now needed on the "Greening of Business" and this is achieved through cooperation; not confrontation. The aim of development is to achieve a state of systems equilibrium based upon environmental soundness, economic feasibility and social acceptability. In a well-designed collaboration, participants bring needed resources and cover the spectrum of knowledge about the ecological health of the planet.

It is obvious that radical changes are urgently needed in the processes of waste management to curb pollution damage to our economically valuable air and land assets, since our land is not a garbage sink. This "Green Acres" Philosophy is an environmentally oriented project, and we would not be burning metals, batteries human waste or much rubber and plastic, which produce high heating values needed in the production of electricity, but which also produce mercury, PCBs dioxins and lead emissions. Chlorine from the paper and PVC plastics in garbage turns into hydrochloric acid which constantly erodes steel tubing, leading to needless annual boiler maintenance fees; so naturally we would not be burning it.

Waste to energy incinerators produce clean, reliable "renewable" power with less environmental impact than almost any other source of electricity! The incinerators do produce emissions but those emissions drift elsewhere, and while these emissions are nothing to ignore, it's no Chernobyl either.

Bio Cycle Magazine - Energy content of incinerating waste. Plastics - 32.8 mj/kg - Rubber - 26.0 mj/kg - Leather - 18.5 mj/kg - Paper - 15.8 mj/kg - Yard waste - 6.3 mj/kg - Food waste - 5.5 mj/kg - Glass and metal - 0.0 mj/kg

As a base level of performance, the plant must comply with strict legislation covering pollution control and the treatment and safe disposal of ash waste. This involves investment in end-of-the-pipe technologies that trap, treat and dispose of emissions. There would also be continuous air emissions monitoring on a website where the public can monitor emissions on a real-time 24/7 basis. Software could be employed to show trends graphically and compare ongoing test results to other model plants and to standards. Information about compliance tests and qualifications of operators would also be topics for communication.

A rigorous enforcement and "Right-To-Know" strategy would be cheaper to operate than a labour/paper intensive process of filing quarterly reports. A large electronic billboard could also be erected at the plant and continuous emissions data displayed so that the public could see the performance in real time.

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in Japan

Sorting out the best way to run a recycling program requires governments and environmental citizens to pay attention to the three "R’s,” Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. We’ve all had the delightfully alliterative “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” axiom drilled into our heads, and yet most of us seem to give just that third ‘R’ all the attention. However, the "Green Acres" Philosophy calls for a 4th, 5th and 6th "Rainbow" of “R's.” "Recover energy, Recoup investment and Retention of landfills." These are the three missing links in the field of waste management.

Recycling today is no longer a fad for the fashionable few. Recycling is not, however, "automatically superior," as a matter of either economics or morality, to the process of manufacturing a product from original raw material. Most of the substances that are commonly recycled--aluminum, steel, glass, some paper and plastic--have some value when delivered in pure form to a manufacturing plant. The problem is that for most substances this value is not great because the ordinary raw materials used to make these substances are plentiful and cheap.

Today, governments already require that products contain a percentage of recycled material, without regard to technical or economic realities. Yet imposing arbitrary quotas is a silly way to run anything. And unfortunately, the demand for postconsumer materials has often failed to keep pace with this boom in collection.

Perhaps the most pervasive misunderstanding among the public is that recycling is an environmentally benign process that in all cases saves resources. Recycling, however, is a manufacturing process like any other: Raw materials must be collected, prepared for processing, and manufactured into marketable goods. Although the process of recycling conserves some resources, it consumes others. Energy, water, and, often, chemical resources are all inputs in the recycling process, and inevitably, this manufacturing process results in some waste.

Despite the defects in the current recycling policies, governments are developing a whole new generation of misguided policies based on faulty premises, and all of these policies have serious fatal flaws.

Governments have citizens racked with "garbage guilt" and the system is creating a growing administrative apparatus that burdens both industry and consumers. Good news doesn't sell as well as bad news, though, and the "sky is falling" sensationalism of environmental activists lead people to falsely believe that our environment is getting worse when it's actually getting better.

Scare tactics and sensational rhetoric have enabled the top 30 organizations to generate billions in annual revenue. But how much of this money is spent on real, hands-on, "muddy boots" conservation work for the environment? Almost none.

Ontario’s mandatory blue box program is an example of municipal solid waste (MSW) management driven by government policy. It cannot be denied that Ontario’s blue box program has been a success in urban areas, where it now has the potential to divert recyclable materials from landfills. The decision-makers did not, however, consider the economic and environmental burden this program would represent for small isolated towns that previously managed MSW at much lower cost. The program also had the effect of promoting recycling at the expense of more environmentally friendly alternatives; such as incineration.

Indeed, it can be argued that promoting the blue box program as environmentally correct, while hiding its true costs in property taxes, has actually had the effect of increasing the production of single-use packaging materials.

Thus, if "Green" is the new "BLACK" $ then why are recycling programs running in the "RED"?

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in Taiwan

There’s a strong resemblance between colours but apparently we’re all colour-blind!

Society can derive many benefits from recycling, but only when it is pursued in an economically efficient manner. Policymakers should attempt to choose the waste management method that, on balance, is most cost-effective and efficient. To be sure, one must also consider the environmental impact of municipal solid waste management alternatives. In many circumstances, simply recovering the energy from packaging in a WtE incineration facility may be more economically efficient than recycling.

Mandated reproduced content requirements, however, prevent these and other "eco-options" from being considered by manufacturers or local solid waste officials.

Collecting, sorting, processing, and transporting trash is expensive, and the costs far exceed the value of the materials recovered. Many "eco-groupies" share the same fallacious premise that recycling is the only environmentally conscious way for the country to save scarce resources and avoid being buried in its own trash. The problem with this simplistic line of thinking is that it is based on common misconceptions about the need to recycle.

The first of these misconceptions is that Canada is running out of safe and secure places for landfills. This notion is simply unsupported. The reality is that there is no shortage of landfill space anywhere in this country. Ontario alone is over a million square kilometers in size--larger than Spain and France combined! Difficulty in siting landfills has less to do with a lack of geologically safe locations than with local opposition. However, municipalities that expand recycling programs must cut other programs or raise taxes to subsidize the effort.

The overall processes take more energy to produce recycled products than it does to dispose of them in traditional landfill methods. Curbside collection of recyclables is often done by a second waste refuse truck in addition to the truck that picks up the regular trash, thus curbside recycling programs require more trash pickups per week. Therefore, collecting waste has an impact on the environment.

Every truck transporting wastes burns non-renewable fuel and produces emissions that contribute to global warming and urban smog. The more wastes we generate, the more trucks we need to collect them and the more emissions we produce; and this is occurring in every city across the country. Thus, the sole benefit of reducing landfill space is trumped by the energy needed and resulting pollution from the current recycling process.

And some of you may've noticed that some plastics have a recycling symbol on them even though they can't be recycled. The recycling industry has been butting heads with the plastics industry over this misleading practice, but unfortunately with no results. The symbol is meant to indicate the type of plastic, not its recyclability. Next to no one realizes this and they are recycling items that cannot be recycled. These items are simply thrown back in the trash after being collected by the recycling companies.

These wastes are best dealt with using waste to energy technologies, including incineration. Is it more environmentally-sound for recycle trucks to burn diesel fuel hauling non-recyclable materials around only to be thrown back in the trash, when they could've been incinerated locally for energy production in the first place?

Therefore, the current recycling programs operating across the country are Garbage!

State-of-the-Art Waste to Energy Plant in France

However, under the "Green Acres"scenario, all garbage is be picked up by one waste truck and after one transfer it is delivered to one mega-recycling plant, where onsite manufacturers turn waste into finished product, then back haul goods to market. All non recyclables are incinerated and the ash is turned into a viable product. Nothing is "wasted!"

With up to 32 million Canucks providing a life time supply of garbage feedstock, which produces low-cost electricity for manufacturing, and, with a built in back hauling supply chain dynamic, this mega-recycling plant is a guaranteed winner and a clean, green, money-making machine!

• Cities across Canada would reduce emissions from trash collecting by half; by eliminating half of the current trucks collecting refuse, as all refuse is collected in a single sweep pass.

Currently GHG emissions for recycling is estimated at 33.6 kg CO2 per ton of recyclables collected. With the savings in mining new coal or oil for fuel and being replaced by trash fuel, and with the elimination of half of the collection trucks emissions; we would eliminate over 80 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emission EVERY year! The gas being harvested from the Kingsway landfill would be used as fuel for our city buses would further eliminate millions of tonnes more of GHG emissions!

• Waste collection expenditures, fuel, oil, trucks, wages, would be cut in half; since only half of the current trucks trips are needed to collect all refuse in a single sweep pass.

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[ 09 July 2007: Message edited by: Sudbury ]