Study Shows Incinerator Traps Most Dioxin Burning Trash Creates Harmful Chemical But Almost All Of It Hauled Away In Ash, Consultant Says

Spokane’s trash incinerator creates nearly three times more dioxin than enters the plant in raw garbage. But the toxic chemicals are trapped in the ash and people aren’t exposed to them, according to a new study.

City officials and consultant Kay Jones of Seattle recently told the City Council they aren’t worried about dioxin measurements taken at the West Plains incinerator this year.

That’s because most of the dioxin created by trash burning doesn’t go up the plant’s stacks.

The ash is hauled away and buried in a Klickitat County landfill designed to keep dioxin and other harmful chemicals out of the environment.

“I feel all the material going into the ash is being totally sequestered,” Jones said.

Several experts reviewed Jones’ report at The Spokesman-Review’s request and had no major quarrels with the findings.

The Spokane plant’s dioxin output is typical of modern plants with good pollution-control equipment, said David Cleverly, a scientist at the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment in Washington, D.C.

“This system does a superb job of controlling contaminants. Most of the dioxin will be in the collected ash. It otherwise would have escaped the process and gone out the stack,” Cleverly said.

Trash incinerators like Spokane’s with dry scrubbers and baghouses - devices that remove pollution - control about 99 percent of all dioxin formed, Cleverly said.

The EPA compiled a national inventory of all U.S. dioxin sources this year and listed municipal waste incinerators as the nation’s No. 1 dioxin generators.

But there was 75 percent less dioxin going into the environment in 1995 than in 1987 due to better pollution controls, Cleverly said.

Produced in minute amounts from burning plastics, dioxins have been linked to cancer, birth defects and a wide range of other health problems.

Compared to other cities where dioxin in trash has been measured, Spokane’s raw garbage has about one-third less dioxin in it - and the plant’s ash output has at least four times more dioxin, Jones’ study found.

The Spokane study is based on a limited sampling - 10 samples taken from a ton of garbage last spring.

With so few samples, it’s hard to draw definitive conclusions because garbage isn’t uniform, said Wayne Krafft, solid waste systems specialist with the Washington Department of Ecology.

National studies show that trash incinerators both destroy and create dioxins.

Spokane’s 800-ton-a-day plant reduces incoming dioxin because the raw garbage is reduced by two-thirds, leaving about 100,000 tons of ash per year to dispose of, the study says.

But additional dioxin created when the trash is burned is more dangerous than what’s in raw garbage, Krafft said.

“There’s a net reduction in grams of dioxin, but a net increase in toxicity. Dioxins in the garbage coming in aren’t as toxic as the dioxins coming out,” Krafft said. “The finding that the toxic equivalents increase is very important.”

However, Krafft agrees with Jones that the public is protected from most of the dioxin.

State regulations require Spokane’s ash to be segregated in a special ash landfill, said Dale Arnold, the city’s environmental programs director.

Because of limited data in the new report, a Spokane environmental group isn’t convinced the city has a good handle on how much dioxin is actually going into the air.

The Northwest Environmental Education Foundation is also critical of the city for hiring Jones, who has clashed with environmentalists and government regulators over dioxin in Seattle, Detroit and other cities.

Jones has had a long career as a consultant for solid waste and medical waste incinerator projects nationwide. He is now president of Zephyr Consulting in Seattle.

“Kay Jones has a reputation as an incineration industry proponent,” said Tim Connor of Spokane, NEEF’s research director. “It’s unfortunate the city chose him. It casts a cloud over the work, even if it’s accurate.”

“I’m a scientist. I am not a hired gun of the burner industry. But it’s always popular to shoot the messenger,” Jones replied.

Jones has also shot back at his critics, court records show.

In 1996, he filed a libel lawsuit against the Oregon Environmental Council and Washington Toxics Coalition for criticizing his risk assessment for a Seattle hospital’s medical waste incinerator.

“They called me a liar. They said I had skewed the risk assessment. They then distributed their criticism in Seattle,” Jones said. “They didn’t have to attack me personally to go after my report.”

“The citizens won, but the lawsuit was a great burden on the people who were named. Temporarily, it had a chilling effect on the debate,” said Carol Dansereau of the Toxics Coalition.

Last year, a King County judge tossed out the case and ordered Jones to pay legal fees to one of the Seattle activists.

In the Spokane study, it’s a stretch for Jones to conclude that the incinerator protects people from dioxin better than any other trash-disposal method including landfills, Connor said.

In his Sept. 14 presentation to the City Council, Jones said dioxin in trash in regular landfills and even in exhaust from diesel trucks passing through town may be a greater threat.

“This is where Dr. Jones, in an effort to please his clients, jumps from the puddle of his (dioxin) analysis to the Pacific Ocean of conjecture,” Connor said.

In the Spokane report, Jones cites his own peer-reviewed study that says landfills release more dioxins to the environment than incinerators.

“He’s way off base on his comparison with landfills,” said Paul Connett, a chemistry professor at St. Lawrence University and co-author of “Waste Not,” a national newsletter. He has debated Jones in public forums about the safety of incineration.

“This is a man who even has argued that eating peanut butter is riskier than incinerator emissions,” Connett said.

The EPA thinks gases burned off at landfills are a “very minor” dioxin source, but the U.S. data are sketchy, Cleverly said.

Jones’ paper should have been independently peer-reviewed before the city released it, NEEF’s Connor said.

“Kay was just giving us a general idea of where he’s found dioxin sources. It was not our intention to point to one as worse than another,” Arnold said.

The city paid $20,000 for the study.

City officials wanted to address the dioxin question while Ecology was surveying the state’s major dioxin sources this year, said Lloyd Brewer of the city’s environmental programs department.

“We knew in advance that the state was going to be putting out its dioxin report and it would point to the waste-to-energy plant as a major contributor,” Brewer said.

The Ecology inventory released this month lists the Spokane trash plant as No. 1 among the state’s known industrial generators of dioxin. Spokane officials complained the report gives them a black eye because most of the dioxin the plant produces is in the ash.

“The major failing of the state report is that they only focused on sources for which they had data. That’s pretty ridiculous,” Jones said.

EPA will release a long-delayed final study on the dangers of dioxin sometime next year, Cleverly said.

This sidebar appeared with the story: DIOXIN Evidence shows dioxin is among a group of chemicals that mimic estrogen or block testosterone, disrupting the endocrine system critical to sexual development in animals and humans.