Incineration Policy

24 Jan 2012

by Pippa Bartolotti
It looks as though the Wales Government are letting a software package decide incineration policy. They are not interested in the weight of evidence pointing out that incinerators damage human and environmental health.

The approval of incinerators as an alternative to landfill has depended on the modelling data obtained from WRATE (Waste and Resources Assessment Tool for the Environment). WRATE is the software tool used by Prosiect Gwyrdd for comparing different management systems treating MSW.

Modelling tools such as WRATE are supposed to contain scientific measures of safety, even though the method used has no more than a 30% accuracy of predicting pollutants levels correctly, and ignores the important problems of secondary particulates and chemical interactions. (The Health Effects of Waste Incinerators, 4th Report of the British Society for Ecological Medicine,2006)

Modelling produces the illusion of a scientific knowledge and a certainty that is entirely unjustified by the imprecise nature of modelling, and it is based on substantial scientific uncertainty and limited scientific data. It produces a mass of complex mathematical data, which implies unjustified precision, and it is difficult for people not familiar with the mathematics to disentangle the inaccuracies. This was summed up by the head of the EPA Carcinogen Assessment Group, Roy Albert, when he said
“Individuals with very different institutional loyalties can produce very different risk assessments from the same materials, where large uncertainties exist.”

In other words it is very easy to bias waste modelling towards the waste operator. It is often treated by regulators and Directors of Public Health as if it was an accurate assessment. In spite of these severe limitations WRATE is extensively used. These risks assessments have almost always concluded that incinerators are safe which flies in the face of epidemiological data which shows the opposite. It also flies in the face of the history of chemical use. The latter is littered with examples of chemicals once said to be safe which were later found to have devastating and unanticipated effects, often beyond the worst case scenario (eg DDT, PCBs, CFCs) The safety of new incinerator installations cannot be established in advance and, although rigorous independent health monitoring might give rise to suspicions of adverse effects on the foetus and infant within a few years, this type of monitoring has not been put in place.

The Environment Agency’s WRATE software is used to claim energy-from-waste is beneficial, but this depends on the uncertainties of user-defined assumptions at input. Proper lifecycle calculations using the better ATROPOS model found that “scenarios using incineration were amongst the poorest performing” while those using MBT were much better. ( Eunomia Consulting report.) [1]
WRATE does not provide an internal weighting of the different environmental impacts as further research is needed to provide a robust weighting methodology. (Emmanuel Gentil, Golder Associates)[2]
WRATE was developed by Golder Associates who also admit it does not model financial or social costs.[3]

Climate Change scientists internationally have called this a “critical climate accounting error” (T.D. Searchinger et al). Dirk Hazell, chief executive of the Environmental Services Association (ESA) said the waste sector felt that WRATE – which is already used by local authorities to procure new waste contracts and take into account emissions – is “inappropriate” for some decision-making because some of the default settings were too generic.

‘Care has to be taken in the use of the tool and the interpretation of the results. The users have a responsibility to understand the processes and interpret the results correctly, so ambiguous information is not provided thus compromising the mitigation of GHG and climate change. ‘Amaya Arias-Garcia – PhD, MSc, BSc (Hons), BEng (Hons).

[1] http://static.london.gov.uk/mayor/environment/waste/docs/greenhousegas/greenhousegasbalances.pdf
[2] http://www.iswa.org/uploads/tx_iswaknowledgebase/2c_-_1130_-_P_-_Gentil_-E_ISWA_2006_Paper_UK.pdf
[3] http://www.walesregionalwasteplans.gov.uk/pdfs/april08/South_West_Wales_LCA_SA_Report_Part_3-Appendices.pdf