Feature: Waste incinerators

Sussex-born scientist Paul Connett returned home this week with an unremitting message on the potential health risks of incinerating waste.

When he moved to upper New York state 18 years ago to teach chemistry at St. Lawrence University, Dr Connett went in search of the quiet life.

But his dreams were shattered after less than two years, after the authorities in St. Lawrence County announced they wanted to build an incinerator to burn household waste.

In the furore that followed the plans were defeated, after a five year battle, and an anti-incinerator campaign was born that was to span the whole of the United States and Canada.

For Cambridge educated Dr Connett one of the main concerns about the St. Lawrence proposal was the build-up of toxic chemicals in the food chain - not least because the fall out from the stack would come to ground on the state's richest milk producing area.

And it was a simple calculation that made him fear the consequences of burning waste would affect the food we eat.

Anybody drinking one quart of milk from a cow exposed to emissions from the incinerator would consume as big a dose of dioxins as somebody standing beside the same cow and just breathing for eight months.

Dr. Connett, who grew-up in Sussex and went to school at the old Varndean Grammar, said: "The scientific literature is very clear, that the substances that come out of the stack are very, very detrimental to human health.

"We are talking about dioxins and furans, they are amongst the most toxic substances that we have ever managed to make in a laboratory and the irony is we make them by burning household trash."

Since his first brush with incineration he has researched waste management, edited the newsletter Waste Not, and lectured about the dangers of burning waste to audiences in more than 40 countries.

It is a message he has brought home to Sussex this week, speaking at a meeting in Lewes last night organised by the anti-incinerator pressure group Defenders of the Ouse Valley and Estuary.

He said: "Incineration, if it is done badly, is extremely dangerous and if it is done well it is extremely expensive.

"If it is done well you get one tonne of toxic ash for every three tonnes of trash you burn. It is really a no win situation, it is an old fashioned idea."

No burners have been built in the United States for seven years, over the border in Canada it has been 13 years since an incinerator was built - in part because of the St. Lawrence campaign.

In Germany, the country with the most advanced incineration technology, public opposition is making it difficult to build them anywhere.

Councils in East Sussex, West Sussex and Brighton and Hove are all looking at building incinerators to burn waste. The Government anticipates more than 100 will be needed nationally to deal with rubbish that can no longer be sent to landfill.

Of the substances that come out of burners - among them lead, cadmium and mercury - it is dioxins which continue to provoke the most anger.

Dr Connett said: "Once these have got into our bodies we can't get rid of them, they have a half life of nine years, the man can't get rid of them but the woman can get rid of them by having a baby, most of the dioxins that are in her fat goes to the foetus."

Concerns about the health effects of incineration are echoed in a report published by Greenpeace this week, which blames incinerators for raised levels of cancers, heart disease, birth defects, allergies and breathing problems.

A comprehensive review of the available scientific data on incineration found people living near incinerators risk exposure to a range of toxic chemicals by breathing or skin contact, and by eating contaminated vegetables, eggs and milk.

Among the report's conclusions was that too little research had been done for anybody to say with confidence incinerators, even the new generation of hi-tech burners, are safe.

Co-author Dr Paul Johnston, of the Greenpeace research laboratory at Exeter University, said: "All the indications are where people have looked for this, whether it is a new incinerator or an old incinerator, wherever they have looked they have found strong evidence of negative impacts."

Among the negative health impacts identified in the report is a two-fold increase in cancer deaths of children living near waste and hospital incinerators operated in Britain in the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.

The report's findings are grist to Dr Connett's mill, who said hormonal problems, inherited by children whose mothers were exposed to dioxins, had not even begun to be investigated.

He said: "The studies that Greenpeace is referring to are the tip of the iceberg. Very few studies have been done and the very fact that the few studies that have been done show an increase in cancer is very significant.

"We know that when we burn trash we create some of the most toxic substances that have ever been made."

For Dr Connett it adds up to a powerful incentive to abandon incineration in favour of a greener approach, recycling and, critically, separating organic and non-organic waste in the home before throwing it away.

He said: "I think it is basically arrogance and I think it is ignorance backed up by over confidence in Britain, they have not got the data here.

"The British Government poisoned you for 30 or 40 years and now they are about to embark on it all over again.

"Britain should have learned its lesson, it is one thing to make a mistake but it is totally unforgivable to go for a second wave of incineration."