Incineration still an option

I refer to Ing. Marco Cremona's reply to my article "Incineration is an option".

I can assure him that I am not trying to force anything down this country's throat. All I am trying to do is to concur with most of the experts who were brought to Malta by both administrations who, in their majority, recommended that a waste to energy plant is the most sensible solution. For a small nation like Malta, which lacks space and does not have the economies of scale for recycling like other countries, this option should form an integrated part of our waste management system.

Ing. Cremona conveniently left out wastes that cannot be recycled or disposed of in landfills. These must be incinerated. I am referring to clinical, abattoir, husbandry, certain hazardous material and port wastes. It is typical for Malta that each government department (health and agriculture) wants its own plant for disposal of its waste. It would have made much more economic sense if one waste-to-energy plant were installed to cater for all such waste.

Various government spokesmen are saying that no such hazardous waste will be dumped in landfills but exported. Do they realise it is not going to be so easy to export it to other countries due to various conventions, to which Malta is a signatory? And what about the costs?

I am not going to repeat what I said in my article regarding recovery and recycling, except to point out that waste-to-energy is considered as recovery by the EU.

I also refer to the letter from Pat Martin from British Columbia in Canada, who is also against incineration. He reasons like most NGOs in Malta. His knowledge about incineration is about a decade behind the times. I was proposing an incinerator that conforms to the EU directive issued in November 2000. The directive is so strict about air emissions that in the UK alone most of the incinerators will have to close down due to non-compliance.

As an example: waste incinerators contribute insignificantly to Irish dioxin emissions and will continue to be negligible even if the sector expands very substantially, according to a first national dioxin emissions inventory by the national [Irish] environmental protection agency. Even if new incinerators burn one million tonnes of municipal waste per year by 2010, their dioxin emissions are projected to rise to just 0.5 grams, or 1.65 per cent of the national total.

To conclude, I would like to point out to Mr Martin that in his British Columbia they have a very high rate of dioxin emissions. This is not due to incineration but due to burning salt laden wood in coastal pulp and paper boilers. I refer him to a report by CCME (Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment).