ZERO-Waste advocates on Monday warned the Philippines against allowing the use of incinerators banned by the law.
Speaking at a summit organized by the National Solid Waste Management Commission, Mariel Villela of Zero Waste Europe and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (Gaia) said that incinerators are on their way out of Europe.
The call was made as environmental groups and waste and pollution watchdogs in the Philippines expressed alarm over the government’s plan to lift the ban on the use of incinerators, which has been prohibited under Republic Act 8749, or the “Philippine Clean Air Act of 1999” and RA 9003, or the “Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2001.”
Groups who oppose the plan to allow the use of incinerators despite the laws that ban the waste-disposal system through burning include Aksyon Klima, Bangon Kalikasan Movement, Cavite Green Coalition, EcoWaste Coalition, GAIA, Green Convergence, Greenpeace, Health Care Without Harm, Miriam PEACE, Mother Earth Foundation, Philippine Earth Justice Center, Philippine Movement for Climate Justice and the Zero Waste Recycling Movement of the Philippines Foundation.
In her presentation, Villela said that use of incinerators, even in Europe, failed to promote waste reduction, reuse, recycling and resource efficiency.
She added that many of the old incinerators are nearly obsolete or reaching the end of their life, which should be taken as an opportunity for municipalities to consider the opportunities in an incineration-free system.
An incineration-free system, she said, is a system aiming at zero waste that would minimize reliance on waste disposal by means of reduction, reuse, recycling and better design of products.
“As Europe is walking the path toward Zero Waste strategies and overcoming a lock-in model based on waste incineration, we warn the Philippines model not to make the same mistakes and ensure that waste disposal stays out of their systems,” she said.
Villela noted that “zero-waste solutions that reduce, reuse and recycle municipal waste are effective and high-impact means of reducing green-house gas [GHG] emissions.”
“When discarded materials are recycled, they provide industry with an alternative source of raw materials from which to make new products. This results in less demand for virgin materials whose extraction, transport and processing are major sources of GHG emissions,” she explained.
Villela added that waste reduction, segregation and recycling help reduce GHG emissions in virtually all extractive industries, including mining, forestry, agriculture and petroleum extraction.
Citing a report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), Gaia noted that “zero-waste solutions also directly reduce GHG emissions and toxic pollutant releases from waste-disposal facilities, which are a significant source of both.”
The IPPC report explains that “burning waste emits carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide; and landfills and dumps are a primary source of methane, as well as carbon dioxide,” stressing that “in fact, incinerators produce more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than coal-fired power plants.”
The report further said that “burning waste also drives a climate changing cycle of new resources pulled out of the earth, processed in factories, shipped around the world, and then wasted in incinerators, landfills and combustion plants that use it as fuel, such as cement kilns.”
Environmental scientist Jorge Emmanuel, on the other hand, discussed the health and environmental problems associated with the incineration of medical waste, describing “medical waste incinerators as a major source of global dioxin emissions.”
He said that viable nonburn treatment options are now commercially available for treating the infectious waste stream.
2 comments
Switching to renewable, sustainable energy will stimulate the economy, create jobs, save money and clean up the environment. “97 percent of top climate scientists and every major National Academy of Science agree that man-made carbon pollution is warming our climate.” https://clmtr.lt/c/S3h0cd0cMJ