In the past two years, the incinerator industry’s propaganda arm has been working double time in the Philippines. You hear its story mouthed by both industry proponents and their lackeys in the government: If we burn our trash, we instantly get rid of the garbage problem, and produce electricity on the side.
If it sounds too good to be true, it’s because it is. Plainly put, everything the industry says about incineration (including “waste to energy” or WTE) is fake news.
Burning waste doesn’t make waste disappear but merely converts it to other forms of waste, which, after incineration, become even more toxic. Worse, it enables the creation of more waste. If society were under the impression that all the “trash” you disposed of can “disappear,” it will consider acceptable the production of more and more waste. Incineration also produces very little electricity while using a lot of energy to burn waste. A study by the US Energy Information Administration additionally found that WTE facilities cost more than coal and nuclear plants to build, operate and maintain.
Clearly, incineration addresses neither waste nor energy challenges. It merely sweeps the problem under the rug—while dangerously abetting the problem it pretends to solve.
The bad news for us is that this cover-up has serious consequences. Incineration, including WTE and its permutations, isn’t as benign as the industry would like us to think. Incinerators are a major source of toxic pollutants such as toxic ash, slag, wastewater, and, of course, toxic air emissions. All these endanger public health and can remain harmful in the environment for up to 40 human generations.
The fact that more than half the cost of today’s “modern” incinerators and WTE facilities are costs for pollution control mechanisms is enough evidence that incinerators are inherently harmful. And we’re not talking small change. The newly built Amager Bakke WTE incinerator in Denmark, the favorite poster child of an incinerator industry desperately touting “green” credentials, cost a whopping 670 million euros (or roughly P40.7 billion). This cost only covers construction. It excludes costs due to technical failures during the facility’s construction, which reached an additional 13 million euros (P789 million), and also doesn’t account for operating and maintenance costs.
So what the incinerator industry is actually telling us is to spend billions of pesos to build and run a machine that burns garbage, and shell out additional billions if we want the facility to filter out pollution—because in the first place, it is an inescapable fact that burning waste is harmful.
And if that weren’t scandalous enough, in order to sell incinerators and WTE facilities in the Philippines, proponents are moving to weaken the country’s environmental laws so we can start buying these billion-dollar garbage-burning, toxin-churning facilities.
The waste incineration ban is enshrined in the Clean Air Act (Republic Act No. 8749) and is supported by the Solid Waste Management Act (RA 9003). At present, lobbies in Congress and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, fueled by industry field trips to “model” WTE facilities in other countries, is out to repeal the ban.
Recently, the Asian Development Bank (which has a history of supporting dirty energy and extraction projects) pitched in on insidious efforts to erode trust in the country’s landmark incineration ban. Of course, it goes without saying that the ADB will likely figure as a lender should these multibillion-dollar projects push through.
The Philippines’ incineration ban is the first and only one of its kind in the world. Current global developments are proving that it is indeed a visionary law.
In Europe, a new directive on the emerging circular economy has rung the death knell for waste incineration and WTE. The Philippines is way ahead with its waste laws. We already have a waste solution at hand. RA 9003 is an important step toward Zero Waste, a proven waste management approach that costs a lot less, creates jobs, and protects health, the environment and the climate. Our lawmakers and government officials only need to redirect political will to implement and protect the law—instead of banking on discredited industry propaganda.
Lea Guerrero is the climate and clean energy campaigner of Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) Asia Pacific.