space Press Releases, News Stories

GAIA Press Release

The treaty aims to eliminate all POPs and lists twelve substances for priority action. The dirty dozen include intentionally produced chemicals such as pesticides and PCBs, as well as by-products such as furans and the cancer-causing dioxins. These dioxin and furan compounds are routinely released as unwanted by-products of industries that use chlorine and from waste incinerators.

The Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance (GAIA) (1) therefore warned governments against continuing to build incinerators of all kinds and against rushing to dispose of POPs by burning or burying their stockpiles of POPs wastes, but to adopt appropriate and safer alternative destruction technologies instead.

“We cannot solve a disaster with yet another disaster,” said Von Hernandez, GAIA Southern Coordinator from the Philippines. “Rather than solving the POPs problem, incineration perpetuates it, and traps developing countries and countries with transitional economies, into very expensive, obsolete and unsustainable waste management regimes.”

Anti-incineration activists around the world find new justification in the new obligations of the Stockholm Convention which calls for POPs wastes to be destroyed or irreversibly transformed so they no longer possess the characteristics of POPs. And, the Convention calls incineration, including so called state-of-the-art forms of burning wastes has been identified as a major source of the most dangerous POP – dioxin. Further, the Convention calls for substitution of alternatives for any processes, including incineration, which produce dioxins.

GAIA calls on proven zero waste policies such as minimizing packaging, composting and recycling for dealing with non- hazardous solid wastes, and the use of proven, existent non- combustion alternative destruction technologies that will chemically or biologically destroy POPs and other wastes without producing new POPs compounds in the process.

The alliance praised recent initiatives that point the way to an incinerator-free world:

· Recently, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) approved an NGO conceived pilot project to set up environmentally safe non-incineration technologies to destroy stockpiles of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the Philippines and Slovakia(2).

· In a similar development, Denmark , a long-time promoter of the use of cement kilns to dispose of pesticides waste in developing countries has announced that the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, due to environmental and social concerns, will no longer be funding aid projects that utilize cement kilns for hazardous waste disposal and will be looking to the newer non-combustion technologies for future on-site disposal projects.

· The country of Slovakia has recently banned the use of PVC plastic. PVC plastic when burned openly or incinerators will produce dioxins and furans.

· South Africa has recently announced an agreement to utilize a sodium based chemical, non-combustion destruction technology to destroy PCBs stockpiles and wastes.