Questions about the proposed Hilo incinerator

[james weatherford]

Questions about the Hilo waste-to-energy (WTE) proposal:

Would WTE prevent trucking from Hilo to Kona? No. Ash and "non-burnables" (unrecoverable metal and glass; oversize, mixed and wet materials) -- 25 percent to 50 percent of tonnage now going in the Hilo landfill -- would be trucked to West Hawaii landfill.
Would WTE cause pollution? No one knows with certainty whether there will or will not be pollution. It is known "waste" incineration generates harmful pollutants; and incinerators have emitted dioxin (known carcinogen), nitrous oxide (greenhouse gas), and heavy metals (local food-chain bio-accumulators).

Do environmental protection regulations assure community safety from pollution? No. Enforcement is typically an incinerator operator being fined after a violation has occurred and pollutants have been released into the local environment.

Does technology assure community safety from pollution? Only if the technology operates perfectly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 20 years or more. Actual experience has been that incinerator operators cut costs on maintenance, which degrades equipment with the result that pollutants are released into the environment. Operator negligence has left some local governments with unplanned expenditures to repair or replace degraded equipment.

How much electricity will be generated? About 3.5 megawatts -- an amount equivalent to about 2 percent of the island's peak electricity generation in 2006.

Is WTE good for the local economy? No. WTE creates minimal local jobs, retains no operating profits locally, and leaves local recycling businesses with an uncertain future.

Would the county go into debt? Yes. WTE would be the largest-ever debt-funded capital expenditure.

What is the alternative? Reward resource conservation. Reduce "waste" generated. Re-use discarded materials. Recycle ever more of the rest. Disposal of the diminishing portion of materials not reused or recycled may require another East Hawaii landfill, trucking "waste" to West Hawaii landfill, or shipping to landfill off-island.



James Weatherford, Ph.D.
15-1888 Hialoa
Hawaiian Paradise Park

[gtill]

H-power on Oahu burns 2,700 tons per day, and supplies 7% of Oahus electric. When it was built, everyone said it would be a menace, however they were wrong! It shows little or no smoke!

Gordon J Tilley

[james weatherford]

"H-Power...shows little or no smoke"

'smoke' is not the point.

Incinerator pollutants -- dioxin, heavy metals, nitrous oxide -- are not associated with 'smoke'. The harm takes place with amounts too small for the human eye to see! and over along period by means of bio-accumulation in the food chain.

There is no epidemiological research to prove or disprove whetherthere been negative health effects from H-Power.

H-Power is sometimes referred to as a success that points to the desirability of incineration in Hilo. This is not an informed position.

First, the environmental health safety of incineration has not been proven (or disproven) at H-Power and has been disproven elsewhere. Hilo cannot place assurance in either technology nor regulations to avoid harmful incineration pollution.
Second, the situation in Hilo in 2007 is not like what it was on Oahu when they built H-Power (1980's/90/s). Oahu is bigger and generates more materials for incineration -- the relatively small amount of materials in Hilo makes the financial difficulties greater.
Third, the markets and processes for recycling and re-using materials is now much, much more advanced so as to make the economics of recycling and re-use much, much more favorable.



James Weatherford, Ph.D.
15-1888 Hialoa
Hawaiian Paradise Park

[JerryCarr]

When Bear and I lived in Atlanta, there would frequently be smog alerts in the summer. Often the visible smog would be more noticeable in the winter, but no alerts would be issued. We happened to meet one of the State of Georgia environmental officials whose job it was to monitor air pollutants, and we asked about this. He told us that the pollutants you CAN'T see are really far more toxic than what can be seen. No visible smoke does not equal no dangerous stuff in the air.

My other big concern about the waste-to-energy project proposed for the Big Island is the cost and the debt. I don't trust the County to build or operate it for what they are saying it will cost right now. Just about all their projects end up costing way more than they start out telling us, and this one won't be any different.

We should ratchet up the incentives for recycling and waste reduction. What can't be recycled or reduced should be barged to Kawaihae and trucked at night from there to the West Hawaii landfill, which we have been told has several decades of capacity left. This would likely be policically unpopular in West Hawaii, but would probably be the least costly way to deal with our trash.

Cheers,
Jerry

[Bob Orts]

Just to add to what James and Jerry stated about pollution.

We have a private recycler near my mainland home that has a license to operate an experimental WTE incinerator for university research and under their control. Because they are doing massive pollution monitoring, they test for pollution beyond the standards required for the type of commodities they burn. They have an excellent safety record, but they do shut down often due to the presence of toxic and hazardous particles.

Although they burn selected products like contaminated paper, wood, certain plastic and cloths, because they are taking products from the general public, often banned items enter the fuel source. A cigarette box with old AA batteries can trigger a shut down. Mercury from a light bulb that was smashed over clothing. Drain cleaner left inside a plastic bottle. All these have entered the incinerator even with their increased inspection.

Now imagine an incinerator where the fuel source was raw garbage and they didn’t have the means of inspecting the vast majority of the fuel source. I doubt a municipal WTE program would be so diligent in inspecting the fuel before incineration. As a final thought, by the time the hazardous particles and gases are detected, they are already being released into the atmosphere. In this experimental program, they have the luxury of immediately shutting down the incinerator for examination, and to locate the souce of the banned item, and how it entered the system. Do you think a commercial WTE generator would do that?

[james weatherford]

Bob,
You get it:
Nice theory for a controlled situation.
Not suitable for living communities with real people.


James Weatherford, Ph.D.
15-1888 Hialoa
Hawaiian Paradise Park

[peteadams]

The other day I was spreading bags of chicken manure on to one of our raised garden beds and wondering how the heck these large, thick and very dirty plastic bags could be recycled. With frustration I ended up putting them in the trash. So that incident provokes my note of skepticism about eliminating a waste disposal method that is guaranteed to deal with my dirty bags and all the other tons of plastic packaging we use as consumers and industrially. The billions of greasy potato chip bags, grubby deli sandwich boxes and messy frozen pizza wraps. Just think about the many yards of shrink wrap that go around palleted materials which themselves are frequently forty or fifty heavy duty plastic sacks containing some possibly toxic material. And so on and on. In all the many years of our trying to recycle as much as possible I simply do not see any move or effort to try to deal with the vast bulk of plastic products that are not shiny, washable #1 soda bottles and the like. Does anyone think that all this plastic waste is actually likely to be recycled?

So in this sense alone I like the idea of burning this junk plastic and getting some energy return from it and for the most part making it disappear from our islands. How about sending container loads to the WTE plant on Oahu via the HSF? Does anyone actually have any other serious proposal for dealing with our mountains of plastic waste in the near term? Ideally there should be some way of seriously dealing with the recycling reality of both dirty plastic and the large variety of plastic types that exist today. That would be far better but even with all the talk about incentives I really don't see it happening.

[Rob Tucker]

The State of Hawaii and it's counties are 20 plus years behind the curve on waste management issues. I do not predict that we, as a state, will catch up and pass the pack in the 2-3 years left on our East Side landfill.

An unlined landfill with 100+ inches of rain a year is a mess in and of itself.

Something short and mid term needs to be done to address this mess until the population here can be entrusted with something like aggressive recycling programs. I trust the citizens with recycling less than I trust the county with an incinerator. Push recycling hard here and what will happen is the trash will get tossed in the bushes and surf.

I just read where there was serious flooding in Samoa (I believe it was Samoa) where the local hospital was heavily damaged. The cause of the flood was the accumulation of trash in the river. The trash and garbage was of sufficient quantity to dam the river. Damn. I know that's extreme but don't think it, or something like it, can't happen here. Aggressive recycling is not passive. It is active, needs to be universal and is labor intensive. People are lazy.

I respect the ideal of aggressive recycling and reduced consumption but I also think it is fantasy to think it can be applied effectively, much less successfully, here in the next decade.

West Hawaii landfill, barging, incinerating, remanufacturing, etc. all have more immediate potential, In my humble opinion, than massive recycling at this moment in time.

Barging, derided by some, is actually what happens to recycled materials here anyway. It gets baled and barged to somewhere else. Too bad it also requires burning more oil to move those trash filled containers thousands of miles away. I prefer to look for Hawaii solving it's own problems rather then shipping them elsewhere.

Opponents of incinerating, like James, have shrugged off the H-Power operation on Oahu and I think that does not serve the issue or argument well. H-Power is there and has been for years. It is not a theory. There is a history there that could, and should, be examined and understood. I find it incredible that the citizens of Oahu would have zero concerns about health and safety. Yet there is no call to remove H-Power. The phrase An Inconvenient Truth comes to mind. I also see an allegory in 100,000 +/- little incinerators called internal combustion engines. I will agree though that the costs I have heard sound way too high and Jacobson may be quite correct about getting fleeced on the price tag for the WTE proposal.

I cannot condemn WTE as a potential solution until I know more.

[Daniel]

I was thinking about what peteadams mentioned concerning dirty yucky bags and such. I have been trying to recycle as much as I can. And since I started I have had A LOT less rubbish. I have been trying to figure out ways to get rid of those things that nobody wants to touch, the things I still throw away (plastic packaging material, dirty or unsanitary plastic material i.e. meat packages, and of course bathroom rubbish). Some plastic could be replaced with biodegradeable materials that I could compost. I would rather see that then burning it. I guess somethings still need to go to the land fill.

Daniel R Diamond

[Bob Orts]

I don’t think James W. is against incinerators outright. I believe, like myself, he’s against Waste As Fuel incinerators, not to be confused with Fuel From Waste incinerators.

Oahu is a Waste As Fuel incinerator. All garbage is tipped towards the incinerator and they remove from the waste the items they want for recycling. Everything else is burned. Since there’s no system to remove hazardous, biological contaminants, or other toxic substances from the waste stream, it goes into the incinerator. From many studies on the mainland, biological, toxic and poison substances need heat at a rate so much higher than can be produced by just waste burning to destroy them. That’s why incinerators used to destroy these potentially dangerous pollutants use a sizable amount of petroleum fuel to reach the temperature required; garbage just doesn’t produce the BTU’s needed. Think of everything that might be in 2,000 tons of garbage each day and ask yourself what potentially is being burned that can be toxic to humans, wildlife and the environment? This incinerator will burn whatever is not removed, so if a potentially dangerous item in the waste stream, unless someone actually identifies and physically removes it, it’s goes up the smokestack. The primary purpose is to reduce solid waste at any cost.

Now, the other type is a Fuel From Waste generator. Unlike above, the fuel is targeted to be removed from the waste stream and processed for fuel. So instead of removing items of recyclable value and burning everything else, they are removing those items from the waste deemed safe for incineration and meet their emission requirements. This incinerator will be burning only those items selected for burning not burning everything they don’t find of value. These types also are much more environmentally friendly since the fuel is targeted, not a broad spectrum, and all pollution controls are designed towards that fuel.

Finally, most incinerators that use waste as fuel, often fail their environmental reviews. The only reason many are still being used is the marketing over reduced solid waste and energy produced. But reality demands that we look at not what they say is being accomplished (reduced solid waste and electricity), but for use to look at what we all know is facts - toxic waste, hazardous material, biological waste and everything else from autos to Zantax is being burned with no idea what is being burned or any known effective pollution control.