KEY FINDINGS
- Waste incineration is not a solution to the triple planetary crisis - it actually contributes to it. Incinerating waste emits large volumes of CO2, pollutes the environment with a variety of toxic chemicals including dioxins, mercury, and many others in quantities exceeding planetary limits, and contributes to biodiversity loss.
- Waste incineration destroys valuable phosphorus resources in biowaste and disrupts global biogeochemical cycles.
- Communities living near incinerators may be at higher risk of health issues due to their harmful effects.
- Air emissions are not the only pollution pathway from waste incinerators: Both fly ash and bottom ash from incinerators are highly contaminated with dioxins and other chemicals such as PFAS.
- Emissions to air from waste incinerators are not fully controlled, as some very toxic substances are monitored for only a few hours twice a year or not measured at all.
- Waste incinerators cannot operate without state subsidies and other forms of economic support from public budgets.
- Alternatives to waste incineration exist for most waste streams, with examples included in the report.
Waste incinerators represent an outdated, unsustainable, and expensive way of managing waste that has negative effects on the environment, human health, and the planetary ecosystem.
Industry promotes including their newer modern incinerators are trying to be included in the circular economy system and are therefore looking for ways to use the bottom ash, which remains up to one third of its original weight from the incinerated waste (Chapter 3.3.3). In this regard, too, for example, the oversized Dutch incinerators have already hit an imaginary ceiling, and the Nobel Prize winner Ernst Worrell therefore described the Dutch roads built from incinerator bottom ash as "linear landfills" (Chapter 3.3.3.1)
While industry hopes that incineration will make waste seems to magically disappear, the reality is that by burning waste we destroy valuable raw materials that we can no longer reuse, recycle or compost, while an unusable one-third of the original weight of waste remains as hazardous waste, enriched with toxic substances. By operating incinerators, we support linear waste management, which requires a constant supply of waste and conversely, generates significant volumes of hazardous waste as a result.
The choice of waste management technologies our governments make inherently comes with significant local and global impacts. The destruction of finite resources by entrenching waste incineration leads to a linear instead of circular economy.
In this study, we have highlighted the key impacts of waste incinerators on the environment, human health and the economy. As can be seen, waste incineration contributes to the disruption of the Planetary Ecosystem, particularly through global chemical pollution (Chapter 4.2), greenhouse gas emissions (Chapter 4.1), biodiversity loss (Chapter 4.3), and biogeochemical flows (Chapter 4.4).One of the biggest problems associated with waste incineration is dioxins, which have serious negative effects on human health (Chapter 6), including cancer, damage to the immune system, reproductive problems and developmental defects (Chapter 5.1.1).
Despite strict emissions limits, waste incinerators are responsible for almost one fifth of all dioxins released into the air in the European Union (Chapter 5.1.1.1). It is evident that pyrolysis and plasma gasification of waste, as well as technologies now summarized under the name "chemical recycling" of plastic waste, do not represent functional substitutes for waste incineration and are similarly problematic in terms of environmental impacts or have different negative effects than "classical" waste incinerators (Chapters 3 and 6). The most suitable alternatives in the field of waste management therefore appear to be greater investment in waste prevention, sorting and recycling, which primarily includes bio-waste composting (Chapters 8 and 9.1.3). For municipal waste, the most appropriate solution is to set up systems called zero waste (see Chapter 8.1), even though some residual waste still remains.
This report adds to the growing body of evidence that waste incineration undermines more sustainable Zero Waste policies and the goal of a Circular Economy.
Many countries rely on the European Best Available Technique (BAT) guidelines (European Commission, 2019) as the basis for their own country specific industrial regulation standards to justify approving incinerator projects. Yet this report highlights the significant failures of these guidelines as experienced by the Czech Republic and many other European countries. The material reality of the adverse impacts of waste incineration on those communities living close to such facilities is underscored by this document.
As the Global South faces a concerted push to establish waste incineration widely, particularly in the Southeast Asian region, where there is little experience with such technologies and industrial regulatory oversight is not assured, the protection of the environment and human health subsequently faces many serious threats.
Despite the claims of waste incineration proponents and governments that the EU Best Practice Standards for waste incineration operations are robust and protect human health and the environment, but the most dangerous substances (such as dioxins or mercury) that are produced during combustion are monitored in emissions only twice a year, and many of them are not monitored at all (Chapters 3.1 and 5.1.1.1). Waste incinerators also release significant amounts of mercury and other toxic metals into the environment with negative effects on health. Due to emission limits, incinerators must clean their flue gases. However, this creates another flow of toxic waste in the form of ash and air pollution control (APC) residues, which should require strict handling and treatment regulations as a hazardous waste. (Chapters 3.3 and 5.1.1.3). The failure to adequately account for and regulate fly ash, and therefore, the dioxins and other POPs it contains, significantly contributes to exceeding the planetary limits of chemical pollution (Chapter 4.2). The amount of unregulated dioxins in fly ash out of control corresponds to the maximum tolerable intake of these substances for the population of up to 133 planets Earth.
Incinerating waste, while producing the energy that powers our modern, energy-intensive lives, also actively contributes to the cycle of climate change. Emissions of carbon dioxide, created by the combustion process, are one of the driving forces behind the greenhouse effect, which has serious consequences in the form of global warming and climate change. By 2050, the conversion of plastic waste to energy (including incineration in WtE) will lead to greater emissions of carbon dioxide than the burning of fossil fuels. Energy utilization of waste therefore does not help solve global climate change but contributes to it and thus represents a dead end in replacing coal (Chapter 4.1).
