No smoke without a liar

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http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=99 & category=76

 

 

No smoke without a liar

 

 

Date Published: 26/10/2001

Author: Ralph Ryder

 

Where incinerators are concerned, writes Ralph Ryder, the only thing really

disposed of is the truth.

In 1959 Dr Friedrich Hoffman, a chemical warfare specialist and chief of the

United States Army Chemical Corps’ Agents Research Branch at the Edgewood

Arsenal, was sent to Europe to scout for potential chemical warfare agents. In

his trip report Dr Hoffman noted that he had received ‘startling information’

about the toxicity of dioxin, including the fact that it had been linked to

severe and sometimes fatal liver damage. Dr Hoffman reportedly told the army

that ‘dioxin was TOO DEADLY to be used for CHEMICAL WARFARE purposes’.1

 

Forty two years later, on 3 July 2001, BBC’s Newsnight featured a report on the

use of a mixture of highly contaminated incinerator fly ash and bottom ash on

the allotments at Byker, Newcastle, and in breeze block type buildings and road

aggregate at the Edmonton incinerator in London. This mixture contained a number

of toxins including: arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead, zinc, nickel, copper and

Polychlorinated Dibenzodioxin, more commonly known as dioxin.

 

Dioxin is perhaps best known as a contaminate of the herbicide Agent Orange,

used in the Vietnam War to kill foliage. It is a recognised carcinogen causing

cancer in every species every tested. The United States Environmental Protection

Agency believes it is responsible for 100 cancer deaths every day in the US. It

causes Vitamin K deficiency in babies, disrupts the immune system, mimics

hormone function, and interrupts the thyroid, which in turn causes developmental

and neurological problems in children. It has been calculated that up to 8,000

cancer cases will result in Belgium due to the dioxin food contamination that

took place there in 1999. 2, 3 And now, in the UK we are building roads and

houses with it and spreading it on our vegetable patches.

 

After watching the programme, concerned citizens swamped building block

companies with calls for information.4 But few people were aware that the

operators of the Edmonton plant had been mixing fly and bottom ash for

approximately 30 years. They continued this practice despite being informed in

1977, along with the rest of the incinerator industry and the regulatory bodies

of the UK, that incinerator fly ash is heavily contaminated with heavy metals

and dioxin.5

 

At last, communities around the country are waking up to the failings of the

Environment Agency (EA) to protect public health from the dubious practices of

the waste industry, despite claims that ‘incinerators... are the most regulated

industrial process in the UK’.6 In particular, two appalling failures of the EA

to protect public health are the Byker and Edmonton incinerator ash scandals,

both discovered and made public by concerned citizens.

 

At Byker the EA, the Health and Safety Executive, and Newcastle and North

Tyneside Health Authority, were all blissfully unaware of the use of highly

contaminated ash from the Byker incinerator on allotments, farms, school playing

fields, bridle paths etc, for seven years. While the EA may not have known what

was going on at Byker, the evidence is that at Edmonton the EA knew full well of

the extremely high levels of dioxin in its mixed ash, yet still did not stop the

company from ‘recycling’ it.

 

The EA claims it is not its job to monitor the ash produced by incinerators, but

rather ‘the plant operator has a duty of care under the environment protection

Act 1990 to ensure that the waste is transferred to a suitable disposal

contractor. [This} contractor in turn has a duty of care under the Environment

Protection Act 1990 to ensure it disposes of waste at a suitably licensed

landfill’.7

 

Amazingly, while gathering evidence to prosecute the operators of the Byker

plant and Newcastle City Council for spreading contaminated ash around

Newcastle, the EA was simultaneously sitting on a working Ash Group working hand

in hand and encouraging the use of similar mixed ash as road aggregate and in

breeze block type building bricks at Edmonton.

 

David York, managing director of Ballast Phoenix, the company that handles the

150,000 tonnes of ash generated at Edmonton each year, admitted on Newsnight

that tens of thousands of tonnes of the finer (fly) ash containing ‘higher

levels of dioxin’ [than bottom ash] had been used in masonry blocks that went

into houses. However, he dismissed the possibility of this presenting a health

hazard when a house owner drilled into a block saying it will be ‘a short,

one-off exposure.’

 

You think that’s bad? When asked about the toxicity of dioxin concentrations in

the mixed Edmonton ash, environment minister Michael Meacher replied: ‘The

Environment Agency has no information on the toxicity of dioxin concentration in

ash mixed before that date [August 2000].’8 But evidence shows that the EA had

plenty of data on the levels of dioxin in Edmonton ash well before August 2000.

 

During the recent court action by North London Waste Ltd against activists of

Greenpeace, a fax dated 24 July 1998 from Henry Cheung to Peter Montgomery, the

Environment Agency inspector responsible for regulating the Edmonton plant since

1996, was produced as evidence. This showed a lab analysis of the dioxin and

furan levels in Edmonton's electrostatic precipitator (ESP) fly ash measured at

10,800ng/kg I-TEQ (nanograms per kilogram international toxic equivalent). The

handwritten note reports a 14 to 1 ratio of bottom to fly ash produced and has a

set of calculations showing the final levels of dioxins in the mixed ash as

being 771ng/kg I-TEQ. These levels are much higher than the ‘background levels’

spoken of by minister Michael Meacher when he said ‘the Agency was informed by

the operator that test results showed the dioxin levels of mixed ash to be close

to background levels’ (ie those found in normal urban soil).9

 

Furthermore, tests conducted in 1996 on ESP fly ash from UK plants were in the

region of 6,600 and 31,100ng/kg TEQ (Cains et al 1996). Commissioned for a study

by the EA itself in 1997 and 1999, AEA Technology wrote: ‘For this study we use

the range 6,600-31,100ng/kg TEQ to cover the variability found in UK plants’.

 

In other words, apart from any documentation on the public register such as the

fax, the EA itself had indeed commissioned and published measurements from UK

incinerators showing the extremely high levels of dioxins in ESP fly ash long

before August 2000. This data has been available from 1996 – but, if we look at

the public register at Edmonton we find it contains a 1993 ESP fly ash dioxin

analysis, showing 3,600ng I-TEQ/kg levels.10

 

So Edmonton was mixing fly ash with bottom ash knowing full well it contained as

much as 3,600ng/kg to 10,800ng/kg of dioxins. Tests conducted by Newsnight on a

sample block made from 30 per cent Edmonton ash showed 343ng/kg. Therefore the

level of dioxin contamination in this fine mixed ash would be in excess of

1100ng/kg, significantly higher than the 200ng/kg (peaking at 900ng/kg) left as

a result of Agent Orange in Vietnam, where they are still reporting birth

defects and elevated dioxin levels in human tissue 30 years on.

 

Yet with all this knowledge, the EA not only didn’t stop the practice but more

amazingly granted Ballast Phoenix, the company using the mixed ash, a waste

licensing exemption. And all this from the supposed regulatory body! In

addition, workers who handled the ash at Edmonton for Ballast Phoenix were not

given any warning as to the toxicity of its contents or provided with protective

clothing. Nor have any ever been tested for dioxin body levels.

 

Although the operators of EfW incinerators are given the overall responsibility

of monitoring themselves and presenting the data to the EA, sometimes an

independent company is entrusted with the task of conducting or checking some of

the data. Conveniently, a number of these independent companies also appear to

be subsidiaries of the very companies they are supposed to be checking. For

example the Teesside site is managed by SITA. Its ash is tested by EUS

Laboratories Ltd and AES Ltd. The air emissions are tested by AES Ltd, which is

owned by Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux – which owns SITA.11

 

It is highly probable that there were more companies than just Ballast Phoenix

using mixed Edmonton ash. We know a seminar was held by Aggregate Industries

(owners of Bardon Aggregates, who promoted the event) and hosted by Ballast

Phoenix at the Edmonton incinerator in May 2000. There an official from the

Department of the Environment, Transport & Regions (DETR) was proudly showing

people around the ash storage facility proclaiming that as well as Edmonton, ash

from the incinerators at South East London Combined Heat & Power plant (SELCHP),

Tyseley (Birmingham), Dudley (Birmingham), Stoke and Cleveland (Teesside) had

all been used in ‘recycling’.

 

So why was York so reluctant to tell Newsnight where the ash had been used, when

it was obviously done with the approval of the DETR? Could it be that, given the

data on the level of dioxin concentrations in the ash from the AEA Technology

study, along with the company’s own ash-testing data, York could be aware that

perhaps the ash contains much higher levels of dioxin than he cares to admit –

perhaps higher than his friends at EA would find acceptable? Whatever the

reason, we know that incinerator ash has been used in Waltham Abbey by-pass with

the approval of Essex County Council; car parks at Ford's Dagenham plant;

Netherend Lane, Cradley Health in Birmingham; and in roads in Stoke, Dudley, and

Essex.

 

Incineration advocate Malcolm Chilton has claimed: ‘Processed ash entering the

construction market has dioxin concentrations of between 20-50 ng/kg, which

falls within the range of 'naturally occurring soils.’ Yet the reality is the

dioxin level in soil is not naturally occurring at all. It is there as a result

of emissions from past supposedly state-of-the-art incinerators. Even the UK

government acknowledges that up to 85 per cent of the country’s present dioxin

contamination comes from incinerators.12

 

The operators of Edmonton no longer officially recycle fly ash. They claim they

stopped doing this in August 2000 – conveniently just before the EA was to give

evidence to a House of Commons Committee who had been informed of the mixed ash

‘recycling’ methods employed by SITA and London Waste Ltd, by a representative

of the Public Interest Consultants.

 

However, there were plans to recycle nearly 60,000 tonnes of ash as ‘assorted

grades of aggregate every year’ at SITA’s Teesside plant, ‘with support from

Ballast Phoenix’.13 This is worrying because when asked if they had tested the

bottom ash for dioxin [before its use as building material] Jon Garvey, former

regional director of SITA based at the SITA plant in Cleveland, replied: ‘We

haven’t tested for dioxins, because they are assumed not to be there...’ 14

 

Wherever these ashes have been used, be they roads, paths, playing fields,

landfills, building blocks or anywhere else, can justifiably be considered a

reservoir of dioxin that could be released at any time. This could take five,

10, 25 or 50 years – no human containment method lasts forever. It could even be

released next year when a house holder begins a bit of DIY or unsuspecting

workmen dig up the road to lay or repair cables or pipes and release clouds of

dioxin/metal-containing dust when cutting through the roads surface.

 

Furthermore, it is clear that there are people working in the incineration

industry who, in order to reduce companies’ costs, have no qualms about

spreading a compound estimated to be 167,000 times more toxic than cyanide on

areas where children play and in people’s homes.

 

What is bewildering is that the government requires the industry to spend

millions of pounds on fitting anti-pollution devices to capture the most deadly

toxins known to man – and then allows them to spread these toxins around the

open environment in roads and houses – and has two departments, the EA and

DEFRA, actively encouraging them to do so – while the government itself

subsidies the practice with hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of taxpayers’

money.

 

Ralph Ryder is co-ordinator of Communities Against Toxics.

 

 

 

 

 

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