The Coalition is questioning the ECCs issued to pyrolysis projects to be sited in San Pablo City, for industrial waste and Trece Martires City, for health care waste. According to the Coalition, the critical nature of the projects, the lack of track record on the reliability of pyrolysis, being a relatively new technology, and the
lack of informed debate should have compelled the DENR to be more circumspect in its review and approval processes. The Coalition is demanding for suspension of the ECCs already issued to give way to full-scale Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) process that will include informed community participation.

“With growing desperation to ensure the survival of their dying industry, incinerator pushers are scrambling to repackage and reinvent their technologies using various forms of greenwashing including referring to incinerators as clean, renewable energy sources or claiming to have ‘new’ variations like pyrolysis or gasification for the same old and discredited process,” comments Von Hernandez, Co-Coordinator of Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), which unites over 375 groups from 77 countries, including many from the Ecological Waste Coalition, in striving to end wasting and burning.

In their memorandum to Sec. Gozun, the Coalition explains that while pyrolysis may differ in some aspects, it shares some of the drawbacks of typical mass-burn incineration. Pyrolysis systems destroy resources, which could have been recycled, undermine waste prevention and recycling, and produce toxic emissions, which will contaminate and poison our surroundings, bodies and food supply. Burn and destructive technologies, according to the Coalition, terminate resource cycle and defy sustainable development and ecological resource management. The DENR and health care facilities, the Coalition insists, must therefore reject pyrolysis and go for safe and non-burn technologies that do not give rise to the problems and hazards linked with incinerators (4).

The Coalition rebuffs claims that pyrolysis is a clean alternative. As complete absence of oxygen is not achievable, some oxidation will occur during pyrolysis, so that dioxins and other products of incomplete combustion will also be formed. Moreover, the system’s gas and solid residues will contain high level of contaminants. Proponents claim that pyrolysis systems do not generate hazardous by-products, such as heavy metals and the cancer-causing dioxins. However, studies have shown that dioxins, furans and potentially other persistent organic pollutants may be formed in pyrolysis systems. Moreover, the operation of this system poses further monitoring and disposal challenges for government regulatory agencies.