Blowin' In The Wind

PETER BUNYARD EXPOSES THE REAL HEALTH THREATS POSED BY INDUSTRIAL WASTE BURNING AND ASKS WHY THE GOVERNMENT IS COVERING THEM UP.

TENS OF THOUSANDS of people a year may be dying prematurely in the UK as a direct result of government policies that allow industry to burn toxic wastes as fuels -- and get paid to do so.

ACCORDING TO DICK Van Steenis, a retired GP who has made it his work to study the toxic effects of incineration fallout, the catastrophic rise over the past decade in chronic disease, including asthma, cancer, heart attacks and rheumatic disorders, as well as in stillbirths, can be traced to air pollution from industrial plants, and the fallout of lethal microscopic particles that get lodged deep in the lungs. By burning waste oils as fuels, industry is sending plumes of toxic particles into the atmosphere.

Nowhere else in the European Union do governments sanction such a practice which, according to Van Steenis is costing the NHS [pounds]11 billion a year -- as much as one quarter of its total budget -- in unnecessary sickness. Yet rather than admit to the problem, the government has allowed industry to get away with inadequate monitoring, and at times has encouraged the actual falsifying of data.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Toxic particulate matter in the air is measured in PM10s, particles with a size no bigger than 10 microns (10 millionths of a metre). Government figures given to the European Commission indicate that in 1998 the UK had an annual average of 26 micrograms per cubic metre of air (microg/m3): compared with Sweden's 14, France's 59, Spain's 69 and Germany's 40. Yet when we look more carefully at the data which makes up that laudable average, we find suspiciously low numbers coming from regions with the highest pollution potential. An opencase mine at Morpeth in Northumberland therefore registered data from its monitors that showed negative or zero pollution, while Castle Cement at Clitheroe in Lancashire, came up with numbers of -17.

When independent measurements are taken, UK particulate air pollution is shown to be particularly bad. According to Van Steenis, total emissions from US incinerator plants amount to 1,636kg per year, whereas just one incinerator in the UK -- Lewisham, in 1997 -- emitted 20,342kg of particulates and volatile organic compounds without accounting for metals and fluoride. Little wonder, he says, that birth defects have emerged as a serious problem 0.5 miles downwind.

Even in still weather in the UK, pollutants from industry's burning of waste -- including exceptionally toxic dioxins -- can end up as far as 46 miles from their source. And with incinerators now using hazardous waste as prime fuel, the result is the formation of a potpourri of organic compounds combined with a cocktail of gases and metals blowing across Britain and settling, ultimately, in people's lungs.

When chlorine and hydrocarbons are present in the chimney and temperatures lie between 177[degrees]C and 800[degrees]C, then inevitably dioxins will form. And those are just the conditions found at the back end of cement kilns, where temperatures average 230[degrees]C. Abatement equipment in all incinerators and plants burning such hazardous waste should include cooling to below 177[degrees]C, charcoal filters to reduce volatile organic compounds, scrubbers to reduce sulphur dioxide and bag and/or certamic filters to reduce particulates. Few UK plants have any of these items. In the US, federal law requires destruction of 99.9 per cent of waste entering an incinerator.

Is it pure coincidence that as many as 10 per cent of women in the UK now suffer from endometriosis, a condition which can be caused by low levels of dioxins? Dioxin also causes insulin-dependent diabetes and cancers. For example, Orgreave, the site of an opencast mine near Sheffield, has relatively high dioxin levels, and hospital admissions for diabetes -- at 11 per thousand -- are nearly three times higher than in the centre of Sheffield, where dioxin levels are much lower.

FLAWED MEASUREMENTS

In his evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Communities (Session 1998-1999 11th report), Dr Van Steenis pointed out that the monitors used by industry and the Environment Agency are capable of measuring only those PM 10s which are no smaller than PM4. Yet those that enter the lungs and wreak their damage happen to be PM2.5s -- which, conveniently for the authorities, are too small for detection, at least with the monitors currently in place. With the right equipment, though, they can be detected, and, in one study, Van Steenis found that for much of the year PM2.5 levels were higher than PM10s.

When waste oils are burned in incinerators, toxic metals such as nickel, vanadium and cadmium get ensnared in the particles given off into the atmosphere. The dangers of such undetected, unabated pollution in terms of health are glaringly obvious, and are known to government officials. Analysis at one site, says Van Steenis, showed cadmium levels in a school to be equivalent to children smoking some 300 cigarettes daily. That the UK has the industrialised world's highest incidence of asthma, heart deaths, cancer and depression, and also has the laxest regulation of industrial burning of such toxic waste fuels is unlikely to be a coincidence.

COVERING UP

The Government knows all this. At a Health and Safety Executive conference in London, in January 1998, a senior Department of Health official declared that premature deaths caused by air pollution in the UK were a price worth paying for keeping production costs down and making Britain competitive in the waste market. And a 'not to be seen by the public' comment on the Environment Agency's authorisation to Texaco oil in Pembroke to allow burning of its waste at night shows the lengths to which government is prepared to collude with industry.

As so often, the people bearing the brunt of this pollution are the poor. Friends of the Earth points out that 662 of the UK's largest factories are in places where the average household income is less than [pounds]15,000--compared with just five sited where average household incomes are more than [pounds]30,000. In Teeside, home of Britain's most polluting factories, the average income is just [pounds]6,200.

Using simple epidemiological criteria, such as the number of inhalers used by schoolchildren and measurements of peak-flow into the lungs, Van Steenis has traced respiratory disorders back to their source of origin, whether cement works, incinerator, earth-moving equipment, or open-cast coal extraction. And infant mortality rates have also risen sharply (they have doubled in the Rhondda Valley and Merthyr Tydfil) following Environment Agency demands that local councils dump toxic waste in their respective landfills. The councils get [pounds]10 a tonne as a sweetener. Infant mortality figures in those two Welsh areas are now on a par with Belarus in Byelorussia as a result of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, four times higher than in Helsinki and nearly double those of London.

Meanwhile, in schools downwind of air pollution, Van Steenis finds that as many as one out of every three children today suffers from asthma, which was not the case before the strategy to eliminate waste oils by incineration and dumping in landfills. To compound the impact of its pollution policy, the Government attempted to scupper an EU proposal that hazardous waste sites should be at least 2km from residential areas.

HIDING BEHIND DEFINITIONS

Essentially, by permitting waste oils from industry to be labelled as 'fuel', industry and government have escaped from their obligation to treat such oils as hazardous wastes, requiring special treatment. Up to 70 per cent of heavy earth-moving equipment now uses oil waste as fuel, which when burnt as 'waste' it can emit as many as 145 million billion metal-contaminated particles a minute. As if that were not enough, the Environment Agency, through its Trans Frontier Shipment Service, now sanctions the importing of 3,000 shiploads a year of hazardous waste. Some of that metal-contaminated waste is then processed and turned into secondary liquid fuel for use by industry, all ready for distribution into our lungs.

The EC directive on the incineration of hazardous waste dictates that no more than 40 per cent of the fuel mixture to be burnt should contain such wastes. In one instance, spent solvents that had been imported and were awaiting processing, had their category changed to 'petcoke'. By a similar stroke of the pen, a limekiln in Thrislington obtained a licence to burn fuel that was 100 per cent hazardous.

HAZARDOUS EMISSIONS

The emissions from burning waste fuels affect health in different ways. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) affect thyroid activity. Some 15 per cent of women in the UK are alleged to have thyroid deficiency, as Van Steenis points out. Benzene and nitrobenzene can cause leukaemia. Carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulphide affect oxygen uptake by red blood corpuscles, as well as blocking a cytochrome enzyme in the liver which is essential for detoxifying pollutants. That blocking could affect our ability to deal with residues of organophosphate pesticides in food.

Nitrogen oxides generated during combustion, in the presence of VOCs and sunlight, forms ozone, which at levels over 80microg/m3 causes asthma and at higher levels still can bring about heart attacks. The burning of waste fuel oils increases the emissions of nitrogen oxides.

Incineration of waste fuel oils without abatement leads to a massive increase in the emissions of heavy metals, especially nickel and vanadium. The burning of orimulsion, a bitumen product, led to nickel emissions from a Powergen plant that were 3,088 times greater than from a coal-fired plant with scrubbers and vanadium emissions that were 13,705 times greater. Vanadium is linked to asthma, as is nickel; cadmium causes cancers of the lung, breast and prostate; chromium causes lung cancers, as does beryllium.

Epidemiological studies in Australia indicate the relationship between industrial emissions and leukaemia and cancer rates. Less than 5 kilometres from a steelworks in New South Wales, the leukaemia incidence per thousand was greater than 4, whereas it had dropped to well under 0.5 15 kilometres away. During the same period, 1972 to 1994, the cancer rate showed a 10-fold drop over the same distances from the steelworkers' smokestacks. Such findings have been confirmed for other industrial plants in both Australia and the United States.

The sharp rise in asthma among children is probably the most striking indicator that we are now subjecting ourselves to a continual fallout of dangerous chemicals from industrial incineration. Where we live probably says it all; by mapping the use of asthma inhalers among primary schoolchildren Van Steenis finds that the numbers increase in direct proportion to the distance from a major source of pollution, and that the relationship holds right across the country. Significantly, when he tried to develop a 'post-code' inventory for chronic diseases, including cancers, he found himself thwarted and denied access to public health records. As far as the authorities are concerned, what people don't know they can't grieve over... particularly when jobs are at stake.

Peter Bunyard is Science Editor of The Ecologist.

Worldwide, the male sperm count has dropped 30 per cent since 30 years ago -- a fact which is being increasingly linked with dioxins and other such toxic chemicals in the environment

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