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Trash Talk
Airborne dioxin is not the only problem from incinerators. The ash left over after combustion is laced with dioxin and other pollutants. Zhong Rigang, the chief engineer at the Baoan incinerator here, said that his operation sent its ash to a special landfill designed to cope with toxic waste. But an academic paper published last year by Nie Yongfeng, a Tsinghua University professor and government adviser who sees a need for more incinerators, said that most municipal landfills for toxic waste lacked room for the ash, so the ash was dumped in unequipped landfills.
Trash incinerators have two advantages that have prompted Japan and much of Europe to embrace them: they occupy much less land than landfills, and the heat from burning trash can be used to generate electricity. The Baoan incinerator generates enough power to light 40,000 households.
And landfills have their own environmental hazards. Decay in landfills releases large quantities of methane, a powerful global warming gas, said Robert McIlvaine, president of the McIlvaine Company, an energy consulting company based in Northfield, Ill., that calculates the relative costs of addressing disparate environmental hazards. Methane from landfills is a far bigger problem in China than toxic pollutants from incinerators, particularly modern incinerators like Baoan's, he said. While landfill methane can be trapped and burned to generate electricity, virtually none of China's landfills have the equipment.
China's national regulations still allow incinerators to emit 10 times as much dioxin as incinerators in the European Union; American standards are similar to Europe's. Tightening of China's standards has been stuck for three years in a bureaucratic war between the environment ministry and the main economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, said a Beijing official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject publicly.
The agencies agree that tighter standards on dioxin emissions are needed. They disagree on whether the environment ministry should have the power to stop incinerator projects that do not meet tighter standards, the official said, adding that the planning agency wants to retain the power to decide which projects go ahead.
Yan Jianhua, a professor at the State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization at Zhejiang University and director of the solid waste treatment expert group in Zhejiang Province, a center of incinerator equipment manufacturing, defended the industry's record on dioxin. He said that households that burn their trash outdoors emit far more dioxin.
''Open burning is a bigger problem according to our research,'' Professor Yan said, adding that China really needs better trash collection so that garbage can be disposed of more reliably.
Both critics and admirers of incinerators call for more recycling and reduced use of packaging to reduce the daily volume of garbage. Even when not recycled, sorted trash is easier for incinerators to burn cleanly, because the furnace temperature can be adjusted more precisely to minimize the formation of dioxin.
Yet the Chinese public has shown little enthusiasm for recycling. As Mr. Zhong, the engineer at the Baoan incinerator, put it, ''No one really cares.''
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