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Núm. 9- desember 2001 |
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Summary
Editorial Seizures
at the Dump
"Recycle or Die": this was the headline for the editorial in the first issue of this magazine, published in the third quarter of 1991 -soon we'll be celebrating our tenth anniversary. The first issue of Medi Ambient. Tecnologia i cultura was called "Recycling: An Ecological Strategy for Economic Systems". At that time, the Government of Catalonia had decided only a few months before to create a Department of the Environment. The choice of a subject such as recycling indicates the importance given to waste management. Ten years ago, it was a priority: it still is today. Of course, progress has been made in the past decade in regard to legislation laws in Catalonia are among the most advanced in the European Union- and in cleaning up facilities. However, there is still a great deal to be done in regard to public awareness no one wants dumps near his or her own house- and in encouraging bold recycling policies and standing up to the mountains and mountains of waste we generate. Surely the root of the problem lies in the lifestyles and consumerism that, in addition to consuming huge amounts of energy, are characterised by a culture of disposable items. Surrounded by wrappers, we make full use of almost nothing. This issue of the magazine asks a question regarding a current issue: What should we do with solid urban waste? Burn it or reduce it? Should we opt to burn Ðincinerate- what we throw into the trash, or should we recover waste and turn it into a resource? Of course, nothing is just black or white; there are shades of grey and, therefore, possibilities for scenarios that combine both options. What we do know for certain is that dumps are overflowing, and something must be done about it. We feel that the contributors in this issue all of whom are recognised experts- offer, in addition to scientific data, interesting questions for debate and innovative ideas. Enric Tello,
a professor at the University of Barcelona and member of Acci Ecologista,
argues that the price of things is the most effective weapon for encouraging
waste reduction. According to Tello, progress towards a more sustainable
society requires a revolution of efficiency: learning to live better by
consuming fewer materials, generating less waste and recovering as much
as possible in order to turn it into a resource.
Llu's Otero,
operations director of the company Hera Holding, offers very interesting
data on the new generation of dumps. Otero analyses whether or not the
latest generation of controlled landfills is the best option, from an environment
and economic standpoint, for managing the garbage and final waste from
municipal waste.
Josep Puig, long-time ecological activist and ex-councillor of Barcelona City Council, describes the possibilities of small-scale composting, even in iner city areas. Joan Subirats,
Professor of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Barcelona,
takes on a key aspect: public participation. He analyses how to influence
the public in order to achieve certain changes in consumption habits.
Almost ten years after the Department of the Environment was created, this magazine once again discusses municipal solid waste. At that time, the editorial was called Recycle or DieÓ; this time we have used the title Seizures at the Dump because we may not die, but all the dumps we have everywhere could give us seizures. Lluis Reales
"Eliminating" waste or managing materials Enric Tello
The author
argues that cost is the most effective weapon to encourage waste reduction.
The condition of waste, like that of resource, is an economic fact. From
the point of view of ecology, ecosystems follow the general rule of reusing
almost everything. For the author, the advance towards a more sustainable
society requires an efficiency revolutionÓ: learning to live better
whilst consuming less, generating less waste and recovering all we can
of it to turn it into a resource.
Reduction is at the top of the hierarchy in waste management everywhere. It should at least be given priority in theory over the reuse of objects, the recycling of materials and refuse treatment. Nevertheless, the amount of waste per inhabitant keeps increasing almost everywhere. To reduce waste means that government authorities need to invest more than merely symbolic resources in order to direct people habits towards forms of production and consumption that are environmentally more responsible. This means firmly believing in environmental education. The first mistake that is often made, however, is confusing education with preaching and overlooking the communicative efficiency of the price of things that appear on the market. The language of prices is both crude and functional in that expensive things are handled with care while cheap things are soon thrown away. If environmental objectives are missing when companies make decisions to invest in certain types of technologies and not in others, in certain types of product and not in others, or in ways to market and package products and not others, then as consumers we have no alternative when we go to the shop. Without any real alternatives to choose from, people will find it difficult to express their environmental wishes through the meagre purchasing power that they have, so we might as well all preach reductions in waste as long as the dissonant language of the market prevails. Environmental education to reduce waste needs to be thought out, above all, in hard core economic terms. Waste, resources and values The Garraf landfill
site, seen from the upper part of Vall de Joan, looks like a large hanging
valley full of waste in a setting where there is hardly any human presence
at all. Just a few enormous trucks and tractors constantly move around,
like small beetles from such a distance, emptying out and scattering refuse.
If this was a landfill site anywhere in the Third World, instead of the
Garraf Massif, there would be an ant-hill of people, most of them young
children or elderly people, scratching around on the slopes of steaming
waste, looking for something they could make use of. Waste that has been
thrown away because it no longer has any value thus becomes a valuable
resource that sustains the precarious subsistence of other human beings.
The difference between the Garraf landfill and any such site in the Third
World obviously has to do with the value in each place of the objects,
materials and the time that people spend working.
This is the reason why the same things are seen totally differently according to whether they are viewed from the ecological point of view or from the conventional economic point of view that limits its scope to the part that has a market price. The ecological point of view also thinks of exchange but of the kind of metabolic exchange between species and different areas that networks of life construct in ecosystems where materials are kept in permanent circulation by the sunÕs energy, converting the waste from one species into resources for another. The result of this ability to organise itself means that the biosphere does not produce any waste, or hardly any. Fossil fuels are merely an important exception that confirms the general rule in ecosystems that "everything gets used". The extraordinary
material efficiency of geobiochemical cycles in the biosphere is a result
of its ability to make use of the dissipation of solar energy to develop
organised information. Just like a thermodynamic savings book, the energy
that changes and gets degraded in one place can be recovered as information
in another.1 Inversely, the accumulation of waste in any metabolic system
is a patent sign of the inefficient processing of materials. As the American
ecologist Eugene Odum said, waste is misplaced resources.2 Except for the
special case of substances that are toxic for living systems, pollution
produced by waste is the result of its location and accumulation in an
inappropriate place.
As long as the
human technosphere remained at a sufficiently small scale within the overall
biosphere, human societies could trust in Mother Nature, just like any
mother, to keep the house clean by absorbing and recycling all of the waste.
Things have changed however from the situation where the world was relatively
empty of the presence of human beings to one where it is increasingly full.4
Society has grown up and man is running up against the environmental limits
of Mother Nature everywhere. It is time to stop growing and to start evolving.
Unlike mere growth, understood as being the increase in scale of economic activity in a finite biosphere, the improvement of material and energy efficiency achieved through the increase of information incorporated into the technological and social complex becomes a fundamental indicator of the degree of development in human societies. In order to make peace with Nature and to progress in the direction of more sustainable societies, an efficiency revolutionÓ is needed where people learn to live better by using fewer materials, producing less waste, and recovering the maximum amount of waste possible and converting it once again into resources. The myth of spontaneous dematerialisation If resources and waste form part of the same metabolic process, and if the economic metabolism identifies one and the other through the same process of evaluation or depreciation of value, then solutions to the problem of waste must be dependent on changes in the way that resources are used. Policies to reduce, reuse and recycle waste need to go hand in hand with the advancement towards systems that are cleaner and more efficient in using resources, and viceversa. The development of recovery circuits depends on the costs of recycled materials, the price of virgin raw materials, the cost of disposing of refuse material that has been processed in different ways, and the efficiency of the techniques and systems used in each stage of the process. There is a seemingly reassuring myth according to which one does not need to worry about the environment because, in the long term, economic growth in itself will grow out of the ecological problems that it creates. Yet if we take heed of this economic picture, the solution is none other than more growth. In an essay entitled Eulogy for growth, Andreu Mas-Colell states that the combination of unclean technologies and economic expansion leads to the deterioration of the natural environment in the initial stage of growth. This can be called the effect of scale: the larger the scale, the more pollution. This however is just the initial effect because the increase in income changes preferences and sets substitution processes in motion. The attitude that members of society have towards nature is more positive as growth continues and the economic well-being of the members of society increases. (...) To use the jargon of economics, it could be said that nature is a luxury good (...). To sum up, as income per capita increases, the quality of the environment deteriorates although this process is accompanied by a progressively larger investment in cleaner technologies and restoration activities. (...) Sooner or later, then, a critical level of income is reached beyond which economic growth and improvements to the environment go hand in hand. Known technically as the environmental Kuznets curve argument, where there is an initial stage of larger environmental impacts and another one of diminishing impacts, thus turns out to be a sedative. If, instead of a tranquilliser, one wants to understand the real trends, however, the question needs to be asked whether possible improvements in environmental efficiency appear spontaneously as a result of the growth in income and if this theory can be corroborated in real life or not. The argument combines three suppositions that are behind this dissociation beyond a certain threshold level, economic growth, resource use and waste production. The first supposition is the existence of a learning cycle in the perfection and early stages of new technologies. The initial designs are often not very expert although experience over time enables efficiency to be increased (learning by doing).7 The second supposition is an effect induced by the differential improvement of productivity between sectors that, by modifying relative prices, generates a structural change in the composition of the basket of goods produced and consumed. There is a tendency to assume that the structural change will shift the economy towards a lower intensity of resource use and waste production per unit produced. This is also connected with the third supposition, i.e the change in consumer preferences invoked by Mas-Colell. It is believed that higher income and a saturation point in the consumption of products with a higher material intensity reached leads to a changeover in consumer demand to quality services. The environment itself would become a high income-elasticity good. These suppositions are apparently highly probable and appear to be reasonable. However, reality has so far not endorsed the idea that all of this results in any kind of spontaneous dematerialisation on an aggregate scale.8 The environmental Kuznets curves come out very well in the shape of a hillock when per capita income is collated with the evolution of certain parameters of pollution originating from technologies that are becoming obsolete. Once over the peak of the curve, the higher the level of income, the fewer sulphur oxides there are in the metropolis in the developed world, for example. In the same cities, however, there is a shift in the pollution parameters. The substitution of gas for coal combustion improves sulphur oxide emissions into the air although the increase in traffic increases the nitrogen oxides and the formation of ozone in the troposphere in the meantime. A similar thing occurs with the substitution of certain materials for others. The reassuring argument confuses the part with the whole. It is sometimes possible to recreate the line of argument at the aggregate scale with the notion of material or residual intensity per product unit. By dividing the energy or materials used in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at fixed prices, it can be seen that in certain countries, and from a certain point in time onwards, the number of tons of all different types of product in each GDP unit begins to decrease.9 This translates into certain improvements in efficiency although this is regrettably only a relative improvement. The GDP meanwhile continues to grow and the scale effect that Mas-Colell talks about continues to operate at a faster rate than the improvement in material or energy intensity. Cars use less petrol than they did twenty years ago but there are a lot more cars on the roads today. Instead of spontaneously resolving the problem, growth eats away the small improvements in energy, material and waste efficiency that are achieved. It is only through a profound change in the technological and social complex that the strategies of the so-called factor 4 (for energy and some materials) or factor 10Ó (for most minerals and metals) can become possible and that the benefit can really be obtained from dematerialisation options that are truly within reach.10 Mas-Colell also talks about restorative policies because the environment is a public asset par excellence. Its deterioration is detrimental to everybody although the rich can evade its effects more easily.11 When there is an improvement in the environment, everybody benefits without anybody preventing others from enjoying it. Accordingly, the demands for environmental improvement get channelled towards the public sector and this in practice means higher public expenditure. This does not mean that an increase in public expenditure on the environment is such a good indicator of environmental improvement. The relationship can also be interpreted the other way round in that economic growth causes increasing environmental problems that make expenditure necessary for it to be restored. This is particularly relevant when environmental expenditure is channelled through installations that are merely end-of-pipe palliatives that increase the cost without fundamentally resolving the problem.12 Ecological economics considers that this defensive expenditure should be deducted from GDP, instead of being added to it, for this indicator to be used to indirectly estimate the level of well-being. For Herman Daly and Manfred Max-Neef, the increase in the production of unnecessary waste, together with the palliative expenditure that this causes, are two profound examples of the growing gap between real well being and GDP increase. In other words, it is the beginning of a kind of anti-economic growth that undermines real well being instead of benefiting it.13 The development of the consumer society has turned the United States into the umber one materials consumer, with a figure of 84 tons per inhabitant in 1991 that ranges from minerals and fossil fuels extracted from the ground to soil lost through erosion (without counting the water or air). This figure reached over a hundred tons per inhabitant in the mid-1970s. Material requirements have gone down slightly since then due, apparently, to a certain saturation threshold level having been reached. Likewise, the parallel development of European countries like Germany and Holland has led to an opposite trend, with total resource use increasing from around sixty tons to the same level as in North America. Even the efficient Japanese economy, where each inhabitant consumed a total of 46 tons of material resources in 1991, has experienced an increasing trend It would thus appear that spontaneous evolution only leads to a convergence towards unsustainability. We cannot sit back and wait for the Kuznets curve to reach maximum figures like those of the United States and then follow the reassuring decrease forecasted in the long term by Andreu Mas-Colell. From their headquarters in Washington, researchers at the Worldwatch Institute have been involved in estimating what the increase in the use of materials would be for the whole world to achieve the same current per capita level as the United States. Non-fuel mineral extraction would need to multiply sevenfold, metal processing would double, the felling of trees for timber would increase five times, and the production of synthetic products from fossil fuels would increase ten times in quantity.14 As Keynes would so sarcastically say, in the long run, everyone dies. The patterns
are more or less similar for the production of urban waste. Absolute values
for urban waste began to decrease in the United States in 1994-95 for the
first time during an economic boom. It remains to be seen whether this
change in trend will really become consolidated over the coming years.
In any case, this was from levels of two kilos daily or 730 kilos of municipal
waste per inhabitant per year, which were totally unsustainable. 400 are
collected in Japan, 580 in Holland, and 320 in Germany (Table 1). These
comparisons show that the increase in business activity measured by GDP
is only one of the factors determining the amount of waste produced within
a specific territory. By comparing waste generation with the GDP per inhabitant
in a wider sample of countries, two highly interesting things become noticeable.
Firstly, the relationship is weaker than one would think and, secondly,
for waste generation, inequality in the distribution of income is as or
more significant than the amount
Technology and culture As the subtitle of this review suggests, technology and culture are closely related. Waste reduction and the dematerialisation of the economy are real possibilities that are within reach. However, we cannot trust in economic growth or the goodness of the free market to do the job. It is a democratic task and it is something that actually needs to be done. It consists of transcending the culture of the material inefficiency of unclean technologies in production, squandering in consumption, and the badly termed elimination in waste management by actively orientating technological change and social habits towards ecological efficiency, responsible consumption, waste recovery and the minimisation of final waste (figure 3, page 11). As the ecologist Eugene P. Odum says, this means a shift of one hundred and eighty degrees with waste being managed at the outlet point and resources being efficiently administered at the point of entry into the economic and social systemThe forms of production, the patterns of consumption, and the habit of separating refuse have to change all together and in a coherent way throughout the whole chain. Making the step from the elimination culture to the recovery culture requires the development of a new set of tools in three different areas: 1) technologies and management systems aimed at recovery; 2) cultural guidelines that are coherent with reduction, reuse and recycling; and 3) economic instruments that provide incentive. Mass dumping and incineration have been the ultimate management technologies that are characteristic of the stage of management aimed at eliminating waste. The objective was to get the rubbish out of sight or to get rid of it. Experience has shown that these systems create addiction to refuse, they act as a disincentive to recovery and they are incapable of counteracting the unsustainable trend towards an increase in the production of waste. If landfill sites continue to be willing to receive unprocessed, mixed materials at a low cost, if the streets are full of non-selective collection containers and the lorry comes by each night to empty them, why make an effort to reduce and separate rubbish? If the space for landfills becomes scarce and incineration plants are built that need to be amortised by selling electricity and that charge for accepting waste that burns well, it is not worth anybody while reducing and separating rubbish either. When attempts have been made to combine incineration and the dumping of everything together with a certain amount of recycling, the results have been disappointing. In 1960, 60% of all waste in the United States was being incinerated either at open-air landfill sites or in incinerator plants.17 This practice set off the environmental alarm due to the emission of toxic by-products, especially new persistent organic pollutants (POPs) originating from the incomplete combustion of organic materials in the presence of chlorine (dioxines and furans).18 Increasingly conclusive evidence has been made available from scientific analyses of the environmental time bomb that exists and is attributed to the dissemination into the environment of these lipo-soluble and bioaccumulable substances which have carcinogenic and immunodepressive effects in very small doses and that, in even smaller concentrations, act as false hormones that distort the functioning of the reproductive and endocrinal system.19 A recent report from the Worldwatch Institute estimates that the incineration of all types of waste gives rise to 69% of the dioxines and furans that are produced in the whole world and that get dispersed in the atmosphere and end up bioaccumulating in the fatty tissue of organisms like human beings that are at the end of the food chain.20 The flare-up of a social refuse crisis, in the form of protests by people rejecting incineration and landfill sites, on the one hand, and the accumulation of scientific proof on the danger of POPs, on the other, has led to increasingly demanding environmental protection regulations being issued. This in turn has led to a decrease in the percentage of incineration in the United States from 60% in 1960 to 20% in 1997.21 With noteworthy differences according to the social and territorial context, the dominant trends see the same pattern spreading everywhere. The Worldwatch Institute has made an initial estimation of dioxine and furan emissions into the air from the few inventories that are available. Japan is the country with the highest level of pollution caused by these organochlorines and the largest number of incinerator plants in operation (around 3,800, whereas there were only 132 in operation in the whole of the United States in 1997).22 The situation is even more disturbing in Belgium, where there was a serious government crisis in 1999 due to a scandal involving dioxines and PCBs that entered the food chain (Table 3, page 12). Concerning the matter in hand, the most interesting fact is the realisation that street protests and public access to environmental information act as democratic catalysts for technical and cultural change towards a new form of waste management orientated towards reduction and recovery. 10% of the 137 million tons of municipal waste generated in the United States in 1980 was recycled or composted. By 1996, the percentage of recovery had increased to 27% while municipal waste had increased to 210 million tons. Maarten De Kadt is of the opinion that it will be difficult to go much beyond this threshold if the policies of waste management being applied at the end of the chain of consumption are not made congruent with the type of resource management in product manufacturing that seeks to save virgin raw materials and energy through clean production, industrial ecology and the ecological design of new products and services. The true potential of recycling will never be attained as long as the strategy of waste management continues to run into a type of materials management that is headed in the opposite direction. The wheels of production will resist the transformation all the way from waste management to the conservation of resources. A problem of coherency Despite enormous resistance, things in real life are beginning to move in the direction of recovery. Seattle recovers over 40% of its waste, Newark (New Jersey) 53%, and the entire state of Arkansas reached 36% in 1996. The city of New York recovers 17%, although the figure for New York State is 32% and the objective is to reach 50% in the near future. Experimental studies at the Center for the Biology of Natural Sciences (CBNS) have shown that it is not difficult to attain a recovery rate of 84% on a small scale. If this level can be achieved in more general terms, waste incineration would disappear because the remaining materials would be increasingly less combustible.24 Experience shows that active reduction and recovery policies directed from cities, which are the end terminus of the economic course leading from resources to waste, can begin to make headway even when they go against the tide of trends that are still predominant in the production of goods and services. The successive stages that are attained will depend on the degree of congruency or incongruency with the collection and waste processing systems that are used, on the one hand, and, on the other, with the ways that materials are managed in the economic circuits of investment, production, commercialisation and product packaging. All of this is a detailed reminder of what began to occur in Catalonia. With 550 kilos of municipal waste per inhabitant per year, a figure that was much higher than that of countries like Germany, Catalonia found itself totally in the grip of the refuse nightmare. Between 1993 and 1999, the amount of rubbish went up from an average of a kilo and a quarter to almost a kilo and a half. There are regions like Alt and Baix Empord, La Selva, Garraf, Baix Penes, Tarras, Cerdanya, Pallars Sobirˆ and Vall dÕAran, where the consumer habits of both the local resident population and the influx of tourists cause the generation of refuse to shoot up to the same levels as in North America (two kilos per inhabitant per day). Only 11% of the 3.3 million tons of municipal waste produced in the whole of Catalonia is recycled or composted. 68% is directly disposed of all together without any kind of preliminary treatment, and 21% is disposed of in the form of slag and ash from incineration plants.25 The contrast between the situation and trends in different regions of the country corroborate the close connection between technology and the waste culture. There is a significant relationship between the production of refuse and the type of dwelling and consumer habits that still tend to be associated with the increase in purchasing power (Table 4, page 13). Where the incineration of everything dumped together has been imposed, the percentages of recycling and composting are minimal. Paradigmatic cases of regional management revolving around an incineration plant are El Tarragons, El Girons and Maresme and it is here where the levels of recovery are lowest. On the other hand, in places where people protests and/or a more courageous attitude by the local authorities have made room for alternatives, active policies of recovery and reduction are beginning to make headway despite the existence of many obstacles. Protests by
the local community and ecologists brought about the unexpected and last
minute stop to the construction of a large incineration plant in the Zona
Franca in 1997, where it was planned to burn over half of the waste of
the thirty-three municipalities that make up the Barcelona Metropolitan
Agency. Since then, the Metropolitan Waste Management Programme has set
the objective of recovering 60% of all refuse by 2006. Different types
of selective collection attained an overall recovery of 11% in 1999, which
is still a long way from the goal. A look at the situation in more detail,
however, shows that composting and recycling plants are already in operation
and this means that much higher levels of recovery are being achieved in
the deployment of organic and inorganic household material separation (Table
5, page 14)
The possibility of opting for active policies in favour of recovery and reduction is within reach of everybody. The singular experience of door-to-door selective collection deployed in Tiana (Maresme), Tona (Osona) and Riudecanyes (Baix Camp) aroused interest in the media throughout 2000 and lead to a quantum leap to 85% of all household refuse collected being composted or recycled. This result coincides with those of small scale experiments made in the U.S. at the Center for the Biology of Natural Sciences (CBNS), and has already lead to an association between different municipalities in Catalonia that are interested in bringing this into general use. These good practice experiences show that when there is a will to do so, and the means are made available, it is possible to make a spectacular increase in recovery percentages. The results in the first towns to do this are significant for municipalities with both high (Tiana and Sant Just Desvern) and low (Badia del Valls and Ripollet) levels of income, and for both dispersed (Torrelles de Llobregat) and denser and more compact (Molins de Rei, Sant Feliu de Llobregat and Montcada) urban structures. Amongst the fifteen municipalities in the metropolitan area of Barcelona that had recovery percentages of over 15% in 1999, is the municipality that generated the least amount of waste per resident (Badia, with 1.1 kilos/inhab./day), and those that generated the most (Castelldefels, where the wave of beach tourists drives the index up to 2.36, and Torrelles de Llobregat with 1.86 kilos/inhab./day). Economics must always be considered, of course. To start off, however, the task of reducing and recovering waste, innovation capacity and democratic vitality are more important. The key is to establish the involvement of people in general with a message that is comprehensible, motivating and congruent with the collection and treatment systems that are used. Certain technologies, like incineration, act as a vacuum cleaner for waste and create a favourable environment for the unsustainable elimination culture. Others, like composting and methanation of the organic fraction and the recycling of the inorganic part, stimulate the culture of reduction, conscientious selection and the maximum recovery of refuse. Combinations of cold biomechanical systems, like those used in the Ecoparks that are under construction in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, gradually adapt to the increase in the selection of materials at the input by improving the proportion of recovery and refuse at the outlet. Incinerator plants need to be fed with refuse. Economic instruments While the will to do so on its own is enough to start developing the new culture of waste reduction, new economic instruments will need to be applied to bring high recovery percentages into general use for large groups of population. There are two principal ones, the collateral system and ecological taxes. Some kind of collateral, security or deposit on returnable containers and packaging is the most efficient system for stimulating the reduction and reuse of the fraction that most stimulates the increase in the production of unnecessary waste. The Law on Packaging and Packaging Waste (LERE) that was passed in 1997 recognises this, at least rhetorically, in establishing in article six the obligatory nature of a system of deposit, refund and return of containers: "Packagers and
traders of packaged products or, when it is not possible to identify the
aforementioned, those who are responsible for the packaged products when
they are first put on sale on the market, will be obliged to:
Charge their
clients, right down to the end consumer, an individualised amount for each
container that is the object of transaction. This amount is not to be considered
as being the price nor will it be subject therefore to any kind of taxation
The purpose
of integrated management systems will be to periodically collect used containers
and packaging waste at the consumers home or nearby. They are to be formed
in accordance with agreements adopted between the economic agents operating
in the sectors concerned, except for consumers, users and public administration
authorities, and they must be authorised by the competent governing body
in each Autonomous Community where they will be implemented on a territorial
basis, subject to hearing by consumers and users.
The criteria of the new environmental system of taxation recommend that, whenever possible, the liability to pay an eco-tax (or any other economic instrument such as the deposit and return system) must be as far as possible from the end user. Payment on account needs to be transferred to the economic agent who really has a greater response capacity. It is obvious that the concentrated expenditure of companies when they invest carries a lot more weight in producing the problem and in solving it than the disperse and often impotent spending of families at the end of the chain of consumption. Nevertheless, there is always one part of the economic support of the waste collection and treatment system that has to fall, in one way or another, on all taxpayers. It is impossible to impose an Eco-tax on the farmer or fruit seller in the market for each apple skin that gets thrown into the rubbish, or on the furniture manufacturers for our grandparents old furniture that we are taking to the tip. Just as two
cultures clash in terms of the systems of treatment, the elimination and
reduction of waste also confront each other in the system of taxation.
The first looks for the most painless and invisible way possible to make
taxpayers pay. Its logic does not go beyond the mere proportional off-loading
of costs; it costs so much to manage this waste so each one has to pay
so much. The second one seeks to convert the taxes on refuse into an instrument
of environmental education that acts as an incentive for people to adopt
more responsible forms of behaviour. An example of the culture that hides
waste under the carpet so far as tax is concerned is the local authorities
that camouflage their taxes in other figures like the property tax or simply
by making them disappear by paying the expense from general funds.
The application of the tools of environmental economics in the context of a new waste reduction, selection and recovery culture that is congruent with the systems of product packaging, sales and manufacturing and with the biomechanical technologies of compost and refuse treatment, can give a decisive turn to the nightmare situation that municipal waste generation finds itself in in Catalonia. The daily rubbish bag in many towns and villages in Catalonia is already reaching close to the two-kilo average recorded in the United States, and it sometimes exceeds this figure. The municipalities with the highest level of waste generation are often formed of the more dispersed type of urban structure and with the significant presence of tourist, commercial or leisure activities (Table 6, page 17): While it is true that the municipalities that generate most waste have a population with a higher level of income, and towns with a lower available income often generate less, the correlation is not so high because there are other cultural, social and political factors at play (diagram 3, page 18). This is the active gap that the environmental tax regulations need to provide economic incentive for. Tallied and debated There is no definitive relationship between business activity, the distribution of wealth and waste generation. There is only a trend and not a very marked one at that because it can be actively contravened with the development of innovative policies, technologies and culture for managing and reconverting waste into resources. Economics must always be considered, of course, but the same is true for politics and society as well. Environmental improvement is a result of human development and not of economic growth as such. The real increase in people ability to choose is, and has always been, a democratic conquest and never a mere by-product of the increase in income or market turnover.27 References 1 R. Margalef,
Teor'a de los sistemas ecol-gicos, Publicacions de la Universitat de Barcelona,
Barcelona, 19932, p. 94.
Are
controlled landfills necessary?
The author
analyses whether the latest generation controlled landfills are the best
option, environmentally and economically speaking, for the management of
final waste from municipal waste. The author covers eight key aspects:
the reintegration of the environmental rucksack in the earth; the impact
of infrastructures; the environment of controlled landfills; the destination
of final waste; the technologies available; managing demand; costs, and,
finally, its evolution. At the end of the text is a glossary of terms,
which includes some which are new or little known.
This article expresses criteria and conclusions that are strictly personal and the result of a professional career that spans a period of over ten years involved in discovering and providing what was most needed in terms of planning and the development of environmental activities in Catalonia. This includes waste minimisation and industrial emissions; the integrated and fractionated management of municipal waste; the recovery of polluted soils and improvement of the environment; and the disposal of final waste. Experience with a Catalan resource management company that provides integrated environmental services for industry and government authorities, and which has one of the most advanced controlled waste facilities in Europe, has served to complete these views. The objective is to get the key ideas down on paper in a clear way so that the reader can compare and develop a balanced opinion on the subject, especially in the context of the other articles in this journal. My own personal views changed radically when I became involved in the multiple dimensions of controlled landfills and found myself having to deal with these concepts. The article analyses the raison dՐtre of controlled landfills, which are a form of environmental infrastructure designed and managed according to strict engineering criteria (a recent development that is in fact conceptually opposed to the traditional uncontrolled dump) and emphasises their fundamental features that are imperative at the present time Ñwhich we can and must secure so that they may be considered the best available technology that is environmentally correct and economically viable for numerous types of waste Preliminary
treatment and secondary valorization are presented in the analysis, along
with the fractionated management of waste, which are increasingly associated
with this form of end disposal that, along with prevention and recycling,
makes up the Integrated Waste Management System (IWMS)1, a concept that
is internationally consolidated and that should not be confused with Integrated
Management Systems (IMS), an interchangeable term introduced by the Law
on Packaging and Packaging Waste. It is foreseen that the fractionated
management of waste, together with secondary valorization and end disposal
will continue to form a basic component of IMS throughout the first two
decades of the 21st century as a sustainable closed-cycle economy is implemented
that is extensively dematerialised, renewed and environmentalised.
Likewise, the
article seeks to provide criteria for comparison and points of view for
the existing dialectic (which is often more biased than scientific and
logical) on the two main options for disposing of final waste that exist
at the present time. Controlled landfills (isolated reintegration, which
is innocuous to the lithosphere) as well as incineration (thermal oxidation
into the atmosphere) are forced to coexist, with each one specialising
in the ambit that is most fitting, with both of them producing strictly
controlled emissions. Optimised systems of fractionated management of waste
are also being developed although an assessment of these lies beyond the
scope of this article.
Lastly, the cost matrix system of a complete, law-abiding controlled landfill is given by way of illustration and as a preliminary arrangement. The result reveals the likely shortfall in existing standard rates available for municipal waste3 to cover these costs, when this circumstance is expressly prohibited by the Directive. Furthermore, differences in the level of administrative control over the installations in different areas of a region (in the case of the Autonomous Communities) can lead to situations that are controversial in environmental and economical terms, with obsolete vehicles being transported to places where more is paid for this type of consumer waste because of inadequate management (in the fragmentation and the disposal of fluff), the use of low quality compost in agriculture, the environmental dumping of industrial products and environmental services, etc. In the case of municipal waste, the cost of disposal in controlled landfills is at present marginal in relation to the cost of collection. Moreover, the way that this is charged (by overall weight collected instead of by volume4, and even worse when there is a set annual cost irrespective of the quantity) even discourages reduction, selective collection and recovery. Inventive solutions have been found in some countries, such as specific slogans to motivate the return of consumer waste to shops, advance taxation for the managing of consumer waste, and the payment of waste volume through the compulsory use of official taxed bags. Key questions An attempt is made to answer or, at least, embark on the following issues as they concern controlled landfills:
An analysis is made of whether and when the latest generation of controlled landfills are the best available technology in terms of being environmentally correct and economically viable for managing municipal waste/final waste, and whether they are socially and economically acceptable and compatible with the general hierarchy of options of an Integrated Management System. All of this is a delicate and controversial issue for the consumer society at the beginning of the 21st century. Municipal waste is the most complex for waste managers, and it comes closer and is more emblematic for the people who produce it just at the time when the European Landfill Directive is being implemented. However, the principle that the Directive implicitly assumes, i.e. the inevitable contribution to the greenhouse effect of a large part of the carbon atoms from waste discharged in controlled landfills, has not been sufficiently demonstrated. By virtue of this hypothesis, which is pending verification or rejection by the new generation of controlled landfills, the Directive enforces the prevention of Òcarbon drain dumpsÓ by forcing their removal from a growing percentage, prior to discharge in controlled landfills by way of preliminary treatments which have not been sufficiently proven to be preferable. The current Directive bans the natural anaerobic reactor without making this conditional on the efficiency of the collection and valorization of the biogas produced whereas paradoxically it is being promoted by the United States environmental authority at demonstration level. The measures imposed in the European Union will have very important economic consequences in the medium term for many member states with highly diverse climatic, geographical and technological characteristics. Furthermore, the Directive could make many existing installations of this type illegal, for two quite opposite reasons:
If the family that produced all of this in just one year had to store it at home, it would occupy around 7 m3, (without being compacted) and waste would fill the entire house after a whole generation, i.e. 25 years. Given that the current cost of renting accommodation is around 6,600 pesetas/m3/year, the space occupied by the domestic waste produced by a family in just one year, over the course of one generation in the home, would cost 1,155,000 pesetas (with the waste compacted down to 1 m3: 165,000 pesetas/ton/25 years), without accounting for the inconvenience and expense involved in managing the liquids and gases that would escape from the Òstorage roomÓ, given the particular characteristics of refuse and obsolete consumer products (dirty containers, fruit and vegetable remains, leftover food). A controlled landfill in Catalonia charges between 3,500 and 5,000 pesetas to take charge of one ton of waste at the present time, whereas in Central Europe the price increases to around 28,000 pesetas per ton. Following this
illustrative calculation of a problem that every generation has had to
face but never so much as now with the high standard of living of the technological
society, the question needs to be asked: What is really the best strategy
to adopt for dealing with waste? The answer, just like the whole ambit
of the environment, is very easy; the three basic techniques of sustainable
development (that come down specifically to numerous practical measures)
need to be applied5:
A matter that does need to be pinned down, however, due to the interrelationship with controlled landfills, is the basic concepts of pre-treatment (fractionated management) and the secondary valorization of waste and final waste. These generally begin with the physical (size range, ballistic and grading) fractionation of the waste en masse, with the waste fractions then being processed separately by secondary valorization or end disposal according to their composition (biodigestion, composting, selection, manufacture of competitive fuel substitutes, controlled landfilling, incineration, etc.). Now is the time to touch on the never-ending story of the pros and cons of controlled landfilling in the process of the end disposal of final waste, always bearing in mind that resource recovery and the avoidance of impacts are possible. And this without taking into account any improvements brought about by possible and desirable pre-processing beforehand. This naturally gets compared with the basic disposal alternative that exists at the present time, without wishing to be controversial or competitive (and equally compatible with the possibilities of the previous priority options), which is incineration or the atmospheric thermal oxidation at medium temperatures of final waste. Given that a whole treatise could be written on this and the fact that numerous life cycle assessments have already been made, this article limits itself to presenting a comparison (made by the author and summarised in the following table) of the main aspects under analysis, and which is coherent with other results that are consulted. This is presented more as food for thought than as a conclusion concerning the acceptability or suitability of any of the options considered for a particular situation. The eight key aspects 1. The concept of controlled landfilling: returning the environmental rucksack to the earth The material
environmental rucksack of the countries in the European Union is around
75,000 kg/inhabitant/year. While it is obvious that this enormous quantity
of materials Òcomes out of the earth and has to go back thereÓ,
it will also clearly do so (or at least it is expected to) in cycles that
are progressively smaller throughout the third millennium, both in relative
and absolute terms.
2. The territorial impact of discharge infrastructure, and how this conditions the types of solution The surface
area that a modern controlled landfill occupies can be considered to be
acceptable if one compares it with previous figures6: 0.25 m2/inhabitant/25
years, where all of the municipal waste generated is taken, without any
integrated or fractionated management. If one compares the territory covered
by Catalonia and its population, which gives a figure of 6,333.3 m2/habitant,
controlled landfills only take up 4 parts per 100,000 of the territorial
space). This use of territorial space can even be minimised and reused
for specific and attractive purposes, given a certain amount of imagination
(there are very valuable projects on this that go way beyond mere reforestation).
3. Improvements in the controlled landfilling environment. In addition
to the fact that there is no extensive use of materialised labour in construction,
and that many materials can be recycled or renewed, nor is there any rubble
or waste produced during or at the end of its useful life. Access tracks
and unloading platforms are often temporary and recyclable. Structural
designs of the continuous medium that constitutes the controlled landfill
are optimised through calculations using finite 3-D elements.
As has been suggested beforehand, the areas used are often recovered from previous forms of use having a considerable environmental rucksack, such as quarries, or they are clearly improvable as controlled landfills. It must be possible to cover them and not only must this be done in such a way as to prevent emissions and the entry of air, water and sunlight, together with the maximum recovery of water (leachates and rain water) and energy, but they must also be designed for imaginative and attractive forms of subsequent use, like gardens, sports facilities, reserves of botanical biodiversity or botanical theme parks. Installations of this type exist in Catalonia with pitch & put practice courts, and integrated projects for improving the environment are being introduced. 4. The destination of final waste from reduction, reuse and valorization The trend curves and the laws of thermodynamics come to the obvious conclusion that it will not be possible to carry the strategies of dematerialisation, renewal and environmentalisation that constitute sustainable development through to their ultimate conclusion during the first two decades of the 21st century. In the specific terms of waste, these strategies are the reduction in waste generation, reuse-recycling and the efficient valorization of the resources contained in waste, in addition to the minimisation of the impacts of disposal. The mechanisms of demand management have a great potential, although there is a large amount of inertia that prevents them from being introduced. 5. Technological treatment improvements available for certain waste flows and fractions The table below
shows the BAT for certain municipal waste fractions (see table, page 26).
This mechanism
is so important in guiding the transition to sustainability that it was
the subject of a paper on ways to stimulate it at the IV Environmental
Forum Symposium held at the ECOMED-Pollutec trade fair in Barcelona in
February 2001. The paper is available on the Fundaci- F˜rum Ambiental web
page.
In fact, without the contribution of the experts in resource management, rapid progress cannot be made in savings and environmental loads that are frequently caused by resource use. It is also an economic law and common sense that, for a waste manager or a water or electrical energy supplier to be motivated in this sense, they need to participate in the economic and environmental savings that accrue to their clients in the way of new types of Ôwin-winÕ relationships that are not formulated in an easy way. 7. The cost of controlled landfilling The table below
shows the vector type of resource use attributed to municipal waste accepted
at a controlled landfill (the obvious fact that one kg weighs one kg has
not been included). The resource use matrix consists of the group of waste
vectors admitted (see table, page 26).
The evolution of costs As such, it
is not possible to talk of an evolution in costs in the matter of controlled
landfills, simply because the concept is a new one. From the opposite type
of practice, completely lacking in services, controlled landfills got their
image when they are not like that at all. This permitted a charge of 100
to 500 Ptas/t, when it was not simply a question of dumping waste in a
gully, to cover the cost of transport. The environmentalisation achieved
through the use of controlled landfills has increased considerably, to
which we must add the options of renewability used: water and biogas. The
most accepted figure for the cost in Spain at the present time, according
to studies made by the European Union on the occasion of the implementation
of the Directive and various different private operations, is between 6-7
pesetas/kg, and this is still not applied to any installation due to the
lack of municipal financing.
Comparatively speaking, the cost of incineration in Spain has gone up from 0.5 pesetas/kg to around 10 pesetas/kg (for new plants, once the sale of energy has been deducted, with the correct management of flying ash). Glossary Integrated Solid
Waste Management: where the existing options for management are used to
an optimum degree and in an optimum way; all the agents that are involved
participate according to their obligations; each fraction is treated as
required; the necessary instruments are implemented so that all stages
are viable and, as a whole, everything is ecologically efficient, i.e.
the service of managing consumer waste materials is done with a minimal
environmental impact (emissions and use of resources) and at a minimal
expense.
Controlled landfill:
an isolated lithospheric storage space conditioned in an optimum way for
a large part of the environmental rucksack resulting from human activities,
especially the inorganic fractions with simple yet robust techniques that
attempt to imitate the laws of Nature (with no explicit contra-indication
for the organic fractions, in spite of the fact that they imply a higher
magnitude of technical complication).
Municipal waste
incinerator: a highly sophisticated chemical plant for oxidising or evaporating
the organic and other components that can be oxidised from the part that
can actually be incinerated at medium temperatures and with an excess of
oxygen. This results in a large reduction in weight (75%, which in part
is dangerous due to flying ash) and solid and liquid volume (90%), and
gas production (especially, and desirably, of CO2) within very strict concentration
limits of pollutant emissions into the air. Extensive possibilities of
energy recovery.
Valorization:
the use of resources with a rate of efficiency and at a cost that is competitive
with the existing alternatives on the market.
Bibliography Programa de
Gesti- de Residus Municipals de Catalunya. Junta de Residus
References 1 Optimum use
made of each management option, with particular attention to each fraction,
with the intervention of all of the agents involved, and the implementation
of the necessary instruments for viability at every stage.
Waste
incineration:an alternative?
This goes
over the pros and cons of incineration, even dioxin emissions. The authors
theory is that following the adoption of the European Directive in the
year 2000, it can be said that waste incineration is an activity subjected
to the strictest controls and the most stringent limits of emissions into
the atmosphere. Therefore, in his opinion, incineration would be one of
the fundamental alternatives within an integrated waste management system.
The two oldest
systems man has used to get rid of refuse are uncontrolled dumping and
burning. It was not until the end of the 19th Century that the early elements
of what is known today as waste management were established.
It is also necessary to point out that, over the past few years, there has been a world-wide increase in the amount of refuse produced and in the variation of its composition. Some causes of this increase in amounts and of the variation of its content are: Amount:
Prevention in
production as well as in products.
This was ratified and recently complemented by the COUNCIL RESOLUTION on 24.2.1997, regarding a Community Strategy for Waste Management (1997):
Incinerating Municipal Waste The term incineration
can be defined in different ways, but it basically refers to the combustion
of organic substances by means of a chemical oxidation process. When oxidation
is carried out quickly, the temperature of the material increases quickly
due to its inability to transfer the heat generated toward the outside
as quickly as it is produced. As a result, visible radiation is issued,
which we refer to as the flame.
The Legislative Framework In Spain, the
first legal provisions limiting emissions date from 1975 (Decree 833/75),
with limits only on the emission of particles in suspension and which are
not very demanding.
Finally last
year, the EU adopted Directive 2000/76/EC, regarding waste incineration,
which updates the previous ones and does not make distinctions between
incineration of municipal and hazardous waste. It must be incorporated
into domestic law by member states before 28 December 2002. It is scheduled
to come into effect for new facilities in December of 2002 and for existing
facilities in December of 2005. This directive involved the most demanding
limits on emission into the atmosphere that currently exist on a world-wide
level for any type of facility. It also involves adopting limits on the
emission of nitrogen oxides and substantial reductions in the emission
of heavy metals. Once again, this involves extending to the entire EU German
standards on incineration.
In the United States, the first specific legislation dates back to 1970, and involves limits on emission exclusively for particle emission. The second dates to 1990, and is currently in effect, being less demanding than legislation in the EU. In 1994, a draft was published for new legislation that has not yet been adopted. In order to illustrate the progressive effect of these reductions in the values limiting emissions, calculations were made for the dispersion these emissions would have for a refuse incinerator working at a capacity of 1000 t/day, as well as the cleaning capacity of current combustion gas cleaning technologies. Consideration as a pollutant was given to particles in suspension, since this is where most dioxins emitted are associated (see figures, page 34). It is easy to see the progress represented by legislation from 1989, and which, together with legislation from 2000 and current technology that is already being applied, has led us to a situation of almost zero emissions. Incineration Technologies Waste incineration requires having a great deal of attention paid to mastering combustion conditions. Good combustion depends on the so-called Ò3 TÓ rule: temperature, residence time and turbulence. These parameters are generally set when the furnace is designed, but whoever runs it retains control of the temperature by making the thermal load vary, and controlling the combustion air flow. Poor regulation of one of these parameters can generate inadequate operating conditions. Due to the heterogeneous composition of domestic refuse, the combustion process develops under conditions of excess air (legislation requires at least 6% excess oxygen). During combustion, the carbon contained in refuse turns into CO2, so a defect in oxygen could generate carbon monoxide (CO) due to incomplete combustion of the carbon. In the same way, a defect in oxygen would cause the generation of unburned particles and incomplete combustion products (ICP). In order to
apply this treatment system, they must have a lower calorific power, greater
than 1400 kcal/kg, in order to ensure auto-combustion. In small-capacity
incinerators, additional fuel must be added, which tends to be fuel-oil
or propane, although NG is also used.
The main elements and equipment making up a domestic waste incinerator are as follows: a) an unloading
and storage area;
The furnace is not only the element supporting combustion (either by means of grills or rotary kilns), but it also produces the movement of refuse and its turning, which allows the primary air to mix with the waste in order to guarantee a good mixture of combustible and comburent. There are three phases in the furnace area: 1) drying phase,
the duration of which depends on the existing radiative heat, the level
of the mixture of refuse and its aeration;
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