A Call to Summit Participants: Make A Difference,
Work for A Zero Waste Johannesburg Summit

A groundbreaking Zero Waste project has been launched at the Global Civil Society Forum in Johannesburg by the South African NGO Earthlife Africa and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives/Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA). The aim is simple: show truly sustainable development in action, by applying the philosophy of Zero Waste, with a view to eliminating, reducing and diverting waste from landfills and incinerators, as well as raising awareness on Zero Waste programs.

Earthlife Africa and GAIA have called on the sponsors and organizers of the Earth Summit to conduct the event with an aim to divert 90% of the waste from being sent to landfills and to ensure that none is sent to incinerators. Nitin Desai, United Nations Under-Secretary General responsible for the WSSD met last May with Earthlife Africa's Zero Waste team in Johannesburg to express his backing: "I support this project, and encourage all to reach as close to Zero Waste as is possible."

Zero Waste refers to a range of policies and practices designed to achieve a sustainable use of materials and the minimum of waste discarded. "We want to design waste out of this event, and reuse, recycle and compost everything else," according to Muna Lakhani, Zero Waste Project coordinator for Earthlife Africa.

The process (available in full from www.earthlife.org.za as well as www.no-burn.org ) entailed designing unsustainable materials out of the Summit as much as possible (including the banning of materials, such as many plastics), developing the capacity of people to understand and implement the philosophy, and creating a waste management system. The system includes separation of waste at source, an emission-free collection system, the bulking of recyclable materials, diversion of edible food to the poor and hungry and food scraps to pigs, and organics to composting sites. Job creation, black economic empowerment, and ongoing local benefits are key components of the project.

"We hope that Summit participants will fully support the Zero Waste initiative and carry out the kind of solutions needed to save the global environment at this critical time," said Ann Leonard, GAIA's International Co-Coordinator.

The emission-free bicycle-based waste collection system, the establishment of 90 recycling stations around the meeting venue and the training of staff are on track.

A Call to Summit Participants:
Make a Difference, Work for a
Zero Waste Johannesburg Summit

Waste Not, Burn Not

Problems of Incineration

Alternatives to Incineration

Global Resistance Agianst
Waste Incineration

Waste-to-Energy, Waste of Energy

Co-Editors:
Manny Calonzo
Von Hernandez

Writers/ Contributors:
Muna Lakhani,
Manny Calonzo
Neil Tangri

Layout and Design:
Gigie Cruz

For comments and suggestions, please e-mail
The GAIA Secretariat

Archive
Volume 1
Issue 1
Issue No. 2

Volume 2
Issue No. 1
Issue No. 2
WSSD Special Issue

Your cooperation is crucial to the success of the Zero Waste initiative at the Johannesburg Summit. Here is how you can support this effort:

Use as few resources as possible - less water, less electricity, less paper.
Less waste is best!

Segregate your waste and dispose your discards at the recycling stations,
which have separate containers for paper, glass, organics,
hazardous materials and other waste.

Put your waste in the proper containers, to prevent contamination,
to facilitate recycling, to simplify the work of cleaners and collectors.

You are welcome to ask for a tour of the Zero Waste initiative -
just ask a volunteer, stationed near the recycling stations, how to arrange a tour.

Incinerators are an unsustainable and obsolete method for dealing with waste. Alongside the increasing global opposition to incineration, innovative philosophies and practices of sustainably dealing with discards are being successfully developed and adopted around the world.

The Problems with Incineration

TOXIC POLLUTANTS. Incinerators produce over 200 toxic or potentially toxic substances. Dioxins are the most notorious pollutant associated with incinerators that cause a wide range of health problems, including cancer, immune system damage, reproductive and developmental problems. Worldwide, incinerators are the primary source of dioxins. Incinerators are also a major source of mercury and other heavy metal pollution.

TOXIC ASH. When air pollution control equipment does function, it removes pollutants from the air and concentrates them in the fly ash, creating a hazardous waste stream that needs further treatment. Thus, the problem of pollutant releases is not in any way solved; the pollutants are simply moved from one medium (air) to another (solids or water). This ash is highly hazardous but is often poorly regulated. Even landfill disposal is not safe, as landfills leak; but in some places the ash is left exposed to the elements or even spread in residential or food-producing areas.

TOXIC EMISSIONS. Incinerator operators often claim that air emissions are "under control" but evidence indicates that this is not the case. First, for many pollutants, such as dioxins, any additional emissions are unacceptable. Second, emissions monitoring is uneven and deeply flawed, so even current emission levels are not truly known. Third, the data that do exist indicate that incinerators are incapable of meeting even the current norms.

SOCIALLY UNJUST. Incinerators are often deliberately sited in low-income neighborhoods with minority populations, on the theory that politically weak sectors of the population will be less able to resist them. This is a violation of the basic tenets of environmental justice.

FINANCIALLY COSTLY. Modern incinerators are by far the most expensive approach to waste management; construction costs alone can be hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars. The costs of building and operating an incinerator are inevitably borne by the public. Incinerator companies have devised various complicated financing schemes to lock governments into long-term payments, which have often proved disastrous for local governments. Incinerators compete for the same budgets and discarded materials with other forms of waste management, and undermine the source separation ethic that drives proper waste handling.

FEWER JOBS. Incinerators produce far fewer jobs per ton of waste than the alternatives, such as recycling. Incinerators also usually displace existing informal recycling networks, causing additional hardship to the poorest of the poor.

WASTE OF ENERGY. Incinerators are often billed as energy producers, since they can generate electricity. However, a detailed life cycle analysis reveals that incinerators waste more energy than they produce. This is because the products that are incinerated must be replaced using raw materials. This consumes far more energy in the extraction, processing and re-manufacture than would be required if those replacements were made from recycled materials.

MORE PROBLEMATIC FOR THE SOUTH. Most of the history of waste incineration has been in Northern countries; Southern contexts are likely to be even more problematic for this technology. The lack of monitoring ability means that incinerators would be even more polluting than they are in the North. Administrative problems such as uncertain budgets and corruption will interfere with maintenance. And differing physical conditions, such as weather and waste characteristics can render operations difficult or even impossible.

The Alternatives to Incineration

FROM WASTE DISPOSAL TO SUSTAINABLE RESOURCE USE.

Landfills are not a viable alternative, as they are unsustainable and environmentally problematic. Rather, the alternatives must change the entire notion of waste disposal by recycling all discards back into the human economy or nature itself, thus relieving pressure on natural resources. In order to do so, three assumptions of waste management must be replaced with three new principles. Instead of assuming that society will produce ever-increasing quantities of waste, waste minimization must be prioritized. Discards must be segregated so that each fraction can be composted or recycled as best suits it, instead of the current system of mixed-waste disposal. And industries must redesign their products for ease of end-of-life recycling. These principles hold across various waste streams.

Municipal waste programs must conform to local conditions to be successful, and no two will look exactly alike. In particular, programs in the South should not be patterned exactly after programs in the North, as there are different physical, economic, legal and cultural conditions. In particular, the informal sector (waste pickers or scavengers) are a significant component of the existing waste system, and the improvement of their employment conditions must be a central component of any municipal waste system in the South. One such successful example is that of the Zabbaleen of Cairo, who have self-organized a waste collection and recycling system which diverts 85% of collected waste and employs 40,000 people.

In general, North or South, dealing with the organic waste is the most important component of any municipal waste system. Organics should be composted, vermicomposted or fed to animals to return their nutrients to the soil. This also ensures an uncontaminated stream of recyclables, which is key to the economics of an alternative waste stream. Recycling creates more jobs per ton of discards than any other activity, and generates a stream of materials that can feed industry.

ZERO WASTE is a process that seeks to redesign the way resources and materials flow through society, taking a "whole system" approach. Zero Waste means drastically reducing the extraction of new resources and reducing waste at the source by designing products that are non-toxic and can be reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or back into the marketplace - and stimulating the marketplace to use those materials. Zero Waste speaks to all environmental protection concerns: air, water, soil, and species. Zero Waste gradually replaces landfills and incinerators with sustainable enterprises that create local jobs and increase community self-sufficiency.

EXTENDED PRODUCER RESPONSIBILITY is a policy approach that requires producers to take back their products and packaging. This gives producers the necessary incentive to redesign their products for end-of-life recycling, and without hazardous materials. However, EPR may not always be enforceable, in which case bans of hazardous or problematic materials and products may be appropriate.

Using product bans and EPR to force industrial redesign on the one hand, and waste stream disaggregation, composting and recycling on the other, alternative systems can divert the majority of their discards away from landfill or incineration. Many communities have reached 50% and higher diversion rates, and several have set their sights on Zero Waste.

CLEAN PRODUCTION is an approach to industrial redesign that seeks to eliminate hazardous byproducts, reduce overall pollution, and create products and subsequent wastes which are safe within ecological cycles. The principles of Clean Production are: the Precautionary Principle, which calls for precaution in the face of scientific uncertainty; the preventive principle, which holds that it is better to prevent harm than remediate it; the democratic principle, under which all those affected by a decision have the right to participate in decision-making; and the holistic principle, which calls for an integrated life-cycle approach to environmental decision-making.

In a historic demonstration of global rejection of waste incineration, public interest groups and affected communities on six continents took action on 17 June 2002, challenging their governments to bring to a halt the deadly practice of burning waste and move their societies towards sustainable waste systems. Over 130 groups in 54 countries participated in the first ever globally organized day of protest against incineration coordinated by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives/Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA).

Philippines

Participating groups in Armenia, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, India, Lebanon, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, Spain and Taiwan lobbied their governments to reject incineration and shift to sustainable waste solutions. Protest assemblies took place in Japan, Puerto Rico, South Korea, UK and US, including caravans in Argentina, Canada and Italy. Non-violent direct actions were staged in Chile, New Zealand, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and UK. A member in Germany filed a legal complaint against an incinerator company. Groups in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Guam, India, Ireland, Israel, Kenya, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mozambique, Nepal, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Sierra Leone, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Korea, Uruguay and Zimbabwe carried out various information-education activities to mark the Global Day of Action.

The actions coincided with the first day of the sixth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC 6) meeting on the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) in Geneva. The Convention, signed by 151 countries, aims to eliminate the most persistent toxic substances known to science, including the cancer-causing dioxins and furans. According to GAIA, the objectives of the Convention render incineration as an untenable waste management option particularly for countries that have signed the treaty.

The Convention identifies all waste incinerators, including cement kilns burning hazardous waste as a major source of dioxins, furans and polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, and recommends the use of substitute techniques to avoid the generation of these byproduct POPs. As reported by the United Nations Environment Program, incinerators are the source of 69% of dioxin emissions worldwide

"Governments must now ensure the development of safe and sustainable alternatives to incineration. By taking action today, we hope our governments will get the message loud and clear - incineration has no place in a sustainable future," said GAIA Co-Coordinator Von Hernandez.

Thailand

GAIA objects to the endorsement of waste-to-energy incinerators in the WSSD's draft Plan of Implementation. GAIA recommends the removal in the final text of references to waste-to-energy incinerators as a favorable option for the management of waste. Rather than promoting sustainable use of the planet's limited resources, incineration encourages the continuation of society's wasteful practices. Waste-to-energy is actually waste of energy. The following article explains why.

Some incinerators, particularly large ones, are married to a boiler and turbine in order to capture a portion of the heat generated as electricity. These are then billed as "waste-to-energy" or "energy recovery" facilities. Proponents argue that these facilities take an unusable waste and convert it to a resource by burning it. Nothing could be further from the truth; "waste-to-energy" facilities waste more energy than they capture.

First of all, it is necessary to recognize that any object that may end up as a waste product represents more energy than simply its calorific value. The energy involved in the extraction of raw materials, the processing of those materials, the manufacture, the transportation -- all of this energy is lost when the item is destroyed in an incinerator; only a portion of the energy of the chemical bonds in the material itself can be recovered. Any basic life-cycle assessment will show that the calorific value of most items is a small fraction of the energy invested in them. Burning them, therefore, represents a loss of that energy. Recycling of the object, on the other hand, avoids the energy costs of raw material extraction, some of the transportation and processing. Re-use, by eliminating the need to re-manufacture, saves the most energy. By contrast, incineration is a waste of energy.

Incinerators are also not able to capture the entire calorific value of the material burned. In a standard waste-to-energy incinerator, a maximum of 35% of the calorific value of the waste is recovered in the form of electricity. Where incinerators are linked into a municipal steam distribution system to heat buildings, an additional 40% of the calorific value can be recovered. However, such a system represents an immense capital investment present in very few countries and, in any case, of little use in warm climates.

As a side note, incineration is also a means of concentrating the ownership of that energy into the hands of one firm. Whereas waste is owned by the society as a whole, the electricity generated by the incinerator is owned by the incineration firm, and sold back to society. In this manner, the larger society is forced to invest increased energy in production to replace those materials destroyed in the incinerator, and pay the incinerator operator for the privilege of getting back a small fraction of the energy in their own waste. It thus represents a concentration of society's resources into the hands of the already highly capitalized.

From the broader perspective of sustainability, incinerators are also a losing proposition. The biosphere is fundamentally a closed system. As humans come to dominate the globe and command the majority of the earth's material production, we must plan our systems to operate in an environment of material scarcity. Ultimately, this will require a closed-loop economy, where the output of any industry can safely be assimilated by the environment or is input for another. Only this approach will be able to tackle the twin problems of resource scarcity and waste disposal. (Neil Tangri, MRC/GAIA)