Victories in Illinois and Oregon!
GAIA members in the U.S. have been thwarting an emerging threat from the incinerator industry-state policies that support the conversion of waste into fuels.
On August 25th, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn vetoed a Senate Bill (SB 2288) that would have permitted the incineration of fuels made from discards such as plastics and paper. The Governor's decision came after concerted efforts by Chicago's Environmental Law & Policy Center (ELPC) and other citizen activists to highlight the public health and environmental risks posed by this legislation.
The company behind this failed legislation, Indiana Recycling and Renewable Fuels (IRRF), wants to build a pyrolysis plant that would convert waste plastics and paper into fuel pellets to be burned in coal power plants and cement kilns for electricity. IRRF claims this would be a solution for waste plastics that cannot be recycled, and that these pellets would burn cleaner than coal. However, ELPC successfully pointed out that they failed to substantiate this claim with any real evidence-or proof that this staged incinerator could avoid toxic emissions from burning poison plastics such as PVC.
As Joseph Miller (Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility) pointed out in his testimony against a similar energy bill in Oregon: "Plastics that cannot be recycled are the very plastics associated with the greatest toxicity and harm. Do we really believe that these projects, dealing with many different types of plastics containing many types of toxics and additives, and producing many different types of non-condensable gases that must then be incinerated to produce toxic emissions are desirable for our communities?"
The Oregon bill, which proposed redefining "recycling" to include the conversion of waste plastics into synthetic crude oil, was stopped within the House Energy Committee after testimony by Joseph and others.
At the root of these renewed efforts by the burners is a new U.S. EPA ruling (Solid Waste Definition Rule - 40 CFR Part 241) that establishes criteria to determine whether certain waste can be redefined as "fuel" and be thus be exempted from the pollution control rules associated with waste incineration. Unfortunately, public agencies like the Illinois Pollution Control Board have not been too discerning when applying this provision to proposals such as the IRRF plant. In addition, this EPA loophole appears to be encouraging coal power companies to look at burning waste, as in the case of Richmond Light and Power in Indiana.
