Haste Could Make For Costlier Waste

Proving once again Spokane’s capacity to dig up dead horses and beat them to a pulp, a little group of activists has attempted to reignite old arguments over the waste-to-energy plant.

The charges seem shocking: The plant made garbage disposal more expensive. The plant’s smokestack emits dioxins, a class of 205 different chemicals of varying toxicity, some of which have caused cancer in laboratory rats.

None of this is news. These concerns have been aired repeatedly for years in The Spokesman-Review.

Nevertheless, there is an unfortunate potential for polarization and exaggeration, especially among those who lack the time or inclination to look dispassionately at all sides in this dispute.

There is another side, one that those who thrive on alarmism may not mention. After all, only a fool could believe that the policy makers who reside here and chose to build the plant set out deliberately or carelessly to poison and gouge their own community.

Garbage disposal, however it is handled, is one of those issues about which equally well-meaning, reasonable neighbors will disagree.

So, if we could all suspend the panic for a few moments longer, let us review:

At the time Spokane leaders opted for incineration, landfilling was the method viewed with justifiable alarm. Dangerous chemicals from buried garbage had seeped into some local water tables. A new dump? Not in our back yards, public opinion said.

But incineration of garbage generates electricity. Combustion destroys the dangerous hydrocarbons that migrate from raw-garbage landfills into water tables. In fact, dioxins are present in raw garbage; combustion in a state-of-the-art burner like Spokane’s destroys more dioxins than it creates. The incinerator also destroys plastics, which are made from oil and linger indefinitely in landfills.

The initial permit for Spokane’s incinerator allowed it to emit 4.5 nanograms of dioxins per cubic meter of stack exhaust. (A nanogram is a billionth of a gram. There are 454 grams in a pound.)

When the plant opened, it operated so much more cleanly than required that the dioxin limit was lowered, to 0.5 nanograms. Recent tests showed one of the two burners at 0.014 nanograms, the other at 0.506 nanograms, enough to justify retesting, though not hysteria.

Dioxins are created by many other activities, none regulated as our trash burner is: Diesel engines. Forest fires, charcoal grills and wood stoves. Pulp mills. Some aluminum smelters. Crematories. Landfill and compost gases.

Consult your common sense: When Spokane’s incinerator emits a fraction of a nanogram into cubic miles of passing wind, the odds anyone will ingest it are miniscule. It’s riskier to cross the street.

Meanwhile, it is true that garbage disposal has become more expensive. The current fee, locally, is $97 a ton. Of that sum, 34 percent goes to incinerator operation, 17 percent repays the plant’s construction loans, 10 percent pays for landfilling incinerator ash. Also, 22 percent pays for recycling and composting, 5 percent pays for administration and 12 percent goes to operation and cleanup at the area’s old landfills.

If Spokane were to shut down the incinerator, it could send its raw garbage to landfills in the agricultural regions of central Washington for $43 a ton - not counting the cost of future landfill leaks there. In addition, the city still would have to pay the incinerator construction loans and other waste program costs such as recycling and dump closure. Bottom line? Local disposal costs might even rise.

Incineration is risky and expensive. So are landfills.