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Global Alliance objects
to ADB's Incineration Push
Manila, 25
June 2001 - The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives/Global
Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA), criticized the recent statement
made by Mr. Gunter Hecker, Country Director for the Philippines,
Asian Development Bank (ADB) suggesting that the Clean Air Act
(1999) of the Philippines should be revised or amended, particularly
the ban on waste incinerators. GAIA finds Mr. Hecker's statement
inconsistent with Asian Development Bank's call to adopt a new
approach" to stop Asia's pervasive, accelerating, and unabated"
environmental decline.
The alliance finds it very ironic that the ADB is pushing for
a discredited waste disposal technology that produces large
amounts of pollution both air emissions from burning and ground
water contamination from ash disposal - while seeking to halt
the worsening environmental degradation in the region.
In a letter sent to the ADB, the alliance noted that it is also
scandalous for the ADB to espouse a waste disposal method that
produces Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) while the rest
of the global community is working towards their reduction and
ultimate elimination as directed by the recent Stockholm Convention.
Instead of promoting a polluting technology. GAIA urges the
ADB to endorse non-combustion, non-polluting, economical and
ecological approaches to waste management and stop prescribing
POPs-producing technology and support efforts to eradicate dioxins
and other POPs in the environment.
Anti-incineration activists around the world find new justification
in the new obligations of the Stockholm Convention which calls
for POPs wastes to be destroyed or irreversibly transformed
so they no longer possess the characteristics of POPs. And,
the Convention calls incineration, including so called state-of-the-art
forms of burning wastes has been identified as a major source
of the most dangerous POP dioxin. Further, the Convention calls
for substitution of alternatives for any processes, including
incineration, which produce dioxins.
Is it not strange that the ADB is asking governments to have
a strong political will to translate environmental rhetoric
into actions" while asking the Government of the Philippines
to water down the Clean Air Act? The ADB now wants to weaken
this very expression of political will by advising the Philippine
government to lift the incineration ban" according to Manny
Calonzo of GAIA. The alliance urges ADB not to meddle with the
decision of a sovereign people but instead back the efforts
of the Government of the Philippines and the civil society to
fully enforce the said law.
The group also observed that multilateral banks and other financial
institutions often promote waste incinerator projects leading
to situations profitable to both the financial and waste incineration
industries, but damaging to public health and the environment.
GAIA expresses its hope that the ADB would not seek to create
such situations in the Philippines and elsewhere.
GAIA calls on proven zero waste policies such as minimizing
packaging, composting and recycling for dealing with non-hazardous
solid wastes, and the use of proven, existent non-combustion
alternative destruction technologies that will chemically or
biologically destroy POPs and other wastes without producing
new POPs compounds in the process.
For more information, please contact Mr. Manny Calonzo, GAIA
Assistant Coordinator at 436 4733 or 9290376 or visit www.no-burn.org
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