Canada has had many issues with plastic. This year there has been more movement to
plants that burn the plastic as prices have fallen. The market for recycled plastics has fallen to a point where it is cheaper to make new plastics from scratch. Over 80% of the plastic in Canada is ” collected” versus recycled. Now the real question is burning it a real alternative.
B.C. company turns recycled plastic into fuel
Last Updated: Monday, February 2, 2009 | 2:34 PM PT Comments21Recommend24
CBC News
Sean Mabberley stands in front of recyclable plastic that will be sorted, ground, and mixed with wood waste to create fuel for use by heavy industry. Sean Mabberley stands in front of recyclable plastic that will be sorted, ground, and mixed with wood waste to create fuel for use by heavy industry. (CBC)
The plastic containers that Lower Mainland residents put in their blue boxes may end up being burned for fuel rather than recycled, CBC News has learned.
The global economic crisis has pushed the price of plastic so low, recyclers are now paying per tonne to have someone take it off their hands.
At least one Metro Vancouver recycling company has started combining the plastic yogurt tubs and milk jugs with wood waste to create fuel.
Sean Mabberley’s company, Urban Wood Waste, is mixing about 10 tonnes of plastic products each day with wood from demolition sites to make a fuel for heavy industry.
“On a good day, like when the commodity prices were really high, this will be made directly back into #1 plastics. So your plastic toys coming out of China will be made from milk jugs,” Mabberley explained. “On a day like today, this plastic, when there’s no commodity market, will go into processed engineered fuel, and will directly replace the burning of coal.”
Mabberley said that at the peak of the plastics market, high-grade material like the HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) plastic used in milk jugs could fetch $1,300 per tonne. Now, recyclers are paying him $45 per tonne to take it away.
The fuel, containing between four and 20 per cent plastic, is burned to create energy at industrial plants such as the Lafarge cement plant in Richmond and the Howe Sound Pulp and Paper mill on the Sunshine Coast.
Mabberley said Urban Wood Waste had been using plastic from construction materials in its fuel mixture before commodity prices fell, but only started using recyclables in the past two months.
Still a green solution?
Mabberley argues that even though the plastic is not being recycled into new products, using it for fuel is still environmentally friendly, because it’s decreasing the need for fossil fuels such as coal.
“Instead of mining and burning coal and dumping all the CO2 emissions into the air, we’re reusing a plastic,” he said.
But plastic is made from oil, so it still produces greenhouse gas emissions when burned.
Helen Spiegelman, the co-ordinator of Zero Waste Vancouver, is critical of the practice, and other projects to make energy from waste.
“The last thing that we should be burning right now on this planet is fossil-based carbon,” she said, adding that most plastic packaging “shouldn’t have been produced in the first place.”
Spiegelman is concerned that using plastic for fuel will remove the motivation for producers and consumers to reduce plastic packaging.
“By burning it and calling it a fuel, we’re essentially creating a demand for garbage,” she said.
Spiegelman said that putting used plastic in a landfill would be a better alternative to burning it for fuel.
Controversy heats up as cities look to incinerators to solve waste woes.
Nothing creates a not-in-my-backyard mob quicker than the whiff of an incinerator coming to town, even though today’s incinerators have come a long way since the 1940s when they were the darlings of municipalities.
The older operations were essentially combustion furnaces that mass-burned everything and in the process spewed toxic emissions into our airways and eventually water and soil.
The new and improved incinerators offer high-efficiency scrubbers designed to absorb those emissions. They are also using waste-to-energy technology (WtE) that promises to deliver more than just ash.
Waste-to-energy is being touted as a green technology that can produce energy, help with global warming, reduce waste and generate revenue.
But a growing body of evidence suggests the hidden costs of incinerators outweigh the benefits.
The 2006 European Commission’s study, entitled Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Reference Document on the Best Available Technologies for Waste Incineration, found that “. . . emission levels for releases to air from the combustion stage of such (gasification and pyrolysis) installations are the same as those established for incineration installations.”
Both a 2009 white paper from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and a 2008 Tellus Institute report commissioned by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection support the findings of the European report and document high levels of dioxins and furans around the new incinerators.
“Incinerator technology has improved but despite the new technology, they can’t keep certain contaminants out of their waste stream. However they’ve been dressed up, they are essentially still burning waste and creating massive amounts of emissions. The assumption is that the filters are adequate and will performing properly all the time,” said Inka Milewski, science adviser and health watch director for the Conservation Council of New Brunswick.
“Dioxins are particularly problematic because they are linked to certain cancers. They also cross the placenta and have been linked to birth defects. When you start burning waste with any chlorine compounds in it, which all plastics contain, you get high dioxin formation,” said Milewski.
Also of concern are the nano-particles composed of dioxins, furans and new chemical compounds formed by the intense heat. These nano-particles are small enough pass the skin barrier, enter our bloodstreams and lungs where they can cause a number of health problems, possibly even cancerous tumours.
Even the claims of producing renewable energy and generating revenue – a key selling point – appear to fall apart under closer scrutiny. The highly respected waste specialist, Fichtner Consulting Engineers, presented a dismal view of incinerators in their 2004 report, The Viability of Advanced Thermal Treatment in the U.K. Fichtner reported that “many of the perceived benefits of gasification and pyrolysis over combustion technology proved to be unfounded. These perceptions have arisen mainly from inconsistent comparisons in the absence of quality information.”
Linda Gasser, incineration campaign coordinator for Prevent Cancer Now, believes the projects are being pushed through because politicians want a quick solution to a complicated problem.
“There is no magic bullet for the garbage problem but many politicians haven’t researched or addressed the root causes and by the time most communities are aware incinerators are being considered, the deal is so far along that it’s hard to stop the project or re-educate the politicians,” said Gasser.
Perhaps the most ironic twist is that incinerators are not going to get rid of landfills. No matter what the technique used, every incinerator produces residue that is slag, char or ash. Usually 30 per cent of what is burned becomes residue.
According to Paul Cornett, executive director of the American Environmental Health Studies Project: “For every three to four tons of trash burned you get one ton of ash, which has to be treated as hazardous waste.”