TO get rid of municipal solid waste – or more commonly known as garbage – in Davao City, City Councilor Tek Ocampo suggests building a waste-to-energy (WTE) facility.
This is in response to the emergency situation as the sanitary landfill in Carmen, Tugbok is soon to be filled up. Each day, the city generates 700 tons of garbage, according to Ocampo, who is the chair of the Committee for Environment.
But the environmental group Interfacing Development Interventions for Sustainability (IDIS) is against WTE as it is bad for the environment and the health of the people living near the WTE-incinerator facility.
“Incinerators are being fed by plastic or non-biodegradable waste as fuel, it will burn these wastes and turn the water into steam in a broiler and create a high-pressure steam to produce electricity,” IDIS explained. “However, this process results in the emission of highly toxic substances like dioxins and furans…”
Lai Santos, director of Ateneo de Davao University-based Ecoteneo, argued the government has no capacity to monitor dioxin emissions. “This was verified by the Environmental Management Bureau personnel at the recent updating of the Comprehensive Development Plan,” she wrote in an open letter.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) has included dioxin as one of the members of the “dirty dozen club” – a special group of dangerous chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). “It is the nastiest, most toxic man-made organic chemical; its toxicity is second only to radioactive waste,” says chemical experts.
Dioxin is the name generally given to a class of super-toxic chemicals formed as a by-product of the manufacture, molding, or burning of organic chemicals and plastics that contain chlorine.
“In terms of dioxin release into the environment, solid waste incinerators are the worst culprits due to incomplete combustion,” says the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO).
Dioxin made headlines some years back at places such as Love Canal, Niagara Falls in the United States, where hundreds of families needed to abandon their homes due to dioxin contamination. In Missouri, the Times Beach was also abandoned as a result of dioxin pollution.
Dioxin’s proper name, as most chemists know, is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD). The name dioxin is also used for the family of structurally and chemically related polychlorinated dibenzo-para-dioxins (PCDDs), polychlorinated dibenzofurans (PCDFs), and the certain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Some 419 types of dioxin-related compounds have so far been identified but only about 30 of these are considered to have significant toxicity, with TCDD being the most lethal.
According to the UN health agency, dioxins are found throughout the world in practically all media – including air, soil, water, sediment, and food, especially dairy products, mat, fish and shellfish. The highest levels of these compounds are found in some soils, sediments, and animals. Very low levels are found in water and air.
So, what’s the big deal about dioxin? “Once dioxins have entered the environment or body,” the WHO explains, “they are there to stay due to their uncanny ability to dissolve in fats and to their rock-solid chemical stability. Their half-life in the body is, on average, seven years. In the environment, dioxins tend to bioaccumulate in the food chain. The higher in the food chain one goes, the higher is the concentration of dioxins.”
Studies have shown that dioxin exhibits serious health effects when it reaches as little as a few parts per trillion in the human body fat. Short-term exposure of humans to high levels of dioxin may result in skin lesions, such as chloracne and patchy darkening of the skin, and altered liver function.
Dioxin is a potent cancer-causing agent, health specialists claim. The 1994 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) draft reassessment for dioxin’s effects estimated that the levels of dioxin-like compounds found in the general population might cause a lifetime cancer risk between one in 10,000 to one in 1,000.
Dioxin also causes reproductive and developmental effects in animals at very low doses. “Dioxin exposure damages the immune system, leading to increased susceptibility to infectious disease,” studies said. “It can disrupt the proper function of hormones – chemical messengers that the body uses for growth and regulation.”
Dioxin has likewise been linked to a wide spectrum of health effects, including diabetes, testicular atrophy, birth defects, endometriosis and problems with cognitive development.
Unknowingly, each of us has some amount of dioxin in our body. This is because dioxin does not readily break down in the environment. It also accumulates in our body. Continual low-level exposure leads to a “build up” in tissues.
According to EPA, over 90% of human exposure occurs through diet, primarily foods derived from animals. Beef or pork have some of the largest concentrations of dioxin of all food sources. Chicken has the lowest dioxin content of all meats, but is still significant. Vegetarian meat substitutes such as tofu, beans, and rice have essentially no contamination.
Dioxin-like compounds can travel long distances in the atmosphere. As a result, many individual sources may contribute to the dioxin levels depositing onto crops at any particular location.
Meanwhile, Ocampo assured the public that the WTE facility to be built will be a “state-of-the-art,” and those released dioxins “dili siya muadto sa mga residente.
