June 26, 1996 CBNS Press Release for: "Zeroing Out Dioxin in the Great Lakes: Within Our Reach" and "Dioxin Fallout in the Great Lakes: Where it Comes From; How to Prevent It; At What Cost"
CBNS
Queens College, CUNY
Flushing, NY 11367
Phone: 718-670-4180
Fax: 718-670-4189
Contact:
Joyce Rosenthal, CBNS
718-670-4180
Scott Sederstrom, GLU
313-998-0760
For Release: June 26, 1996
The major sources, such as incinerators, that generate dioxin -- the highly toxic and persistent pollutant that millions of Americans are exposed to through their food -- can be replaced by dioxin-free alternatives in the Great Lakes region (the eight adjacent states and the Canadian province of Ontario) with little or no loss in economic activity or jobs, and even with some gains, according to two new reports by the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems (CBNS), of Queens College, City University of New York.
Concerned about the impact of dioxin and other persistent, toxic substances on the Great Lakes, the U.S./Canada International Joint Commission has adopted the principle of zero discharge and has recommended the "phase-out of incineration facilities." But fear of the economic burden on industries, workers and communities has held up such action. The new reports help to relieve these concerns.
About 70% of the airborne dioxin deposited in the Great Lakes comes from incinerators that burn municipal or medical waste. The new study shows that by closing the region's 50 municipal waste incinerators and shifting instead to the dioxin-free alternative -- intensive recycling -- the Great Lakes communities would actually save more than $500 million a year in disposal costs. Shutting down over 600 incinerators in Great Lakes hospitals and installing dioxin-free autoclave sterilizers instead to dispose of infectious waste would increase hospital operating costs by only one-tenth of one percent.
According to the CBNS study, closing the region's incinerators that now burn about 11.7 million tons of municipal waste annually would cost about $300 million per year to pay off their existing debt and another $300 million annually to cover the additional waste disposal costs needed to operate the recycling programs. But these costs would be outweighed by more than $1.1 billion in waste disposal savings: revenue from increased sales of recycled materials, and the avoided cost of incinerator tip fees.
The Great Lakes hospitals that now incinerate their waste face a more than five-fold increase in infectious waste disposal costs in order to meet the anticipated EPA regulations on incinerator dioxin emissions. But at less than half the cost of the required emission controls, the hospitals could install autoclaves that completely eliminate the dioxin problem. The autoclaves would add about $0.60 to a hospital's average operating cost of $800 per patient per day. In the region's 14 commercial medical waste disposal facilities, autoclaves can also operate at lower cost than properly controlled incinerators.
The new reports, "Zeroing Out Dioxin in the Great Lakes: Within Our Reach," and "Dioxin Fallout in the Great Lakes" were prepared by a team led by Dr. Barry Commoner, Director of CBNS, and Dr. Mark Cohen. The findings highlight the cost advantage of pollution prevention over the strategy of pollution control, which is the basis of EPA's existing or pending regulations to limit incinerator dioxin emissions. The study shows that substituting alternatives that do not produce dioxin to begin with is less costly than adding the EPA-required controls to dioxin-generating facilities.
In addition to municipal and medical waste incinerators, the study also evaluated the cost of converting several other dioxin-generating operations -- pulp mills, iron sintering plants, and cement kilns that burn hazardous waste -- to dioxin-free alternatives. Pulp and paper mills, an important waterborne source of dioxins, can be converted to totally chlorine-free operations -- which completely prevents dioxin formation -- at a cost that might raise the price of pulp by only a few percent. The study found that, as a whole, these transitions would create nearly 25,000 new jobs in the region, chiefly as a result of new or expanded recycling-based enterprises, while about 1100 jobs would be lost.
According to a 1994 EPA assessment, dioxin is a major national problem. The general U.S. population's exposure to dioxin, almost entirely through food (chiefly milk, dairy products and beef), creates a lifetime cancer risk hundreds of times above the one-in-a-million standard and threatens serious defects during fetal development of the endocrine, immune and nervous systems. The CBNS study found that the transition to dioxin-free alternatives would have the same, readily manageable, economic impact nationally as it would in the Great Lakes.
"Zeroing out the incinerators and other sources that produce dioxin -- not only in the Great Lakes region, but nationally -- makes sense. It is technically sound, economically achievable, and an urgent environmental necessity," said Dr. Commoner.
An earlier study by CBNS in 1995 showed for the first time that the more than one thousand U.S. and Canadian sources -- chiefly incinerators that burn municipal, medical or hazardous waste -- spread toxic dioxin fallout over both countries. Significant amounts of dioxin are deposited in the Great Lakes from incinerators as far away as Florida, Louisiana and Texas. This finding explains why most human exposure is due to dairy foods and beef even though few of the farms that produce these foods are near dioxin-emitting incinerators.
The CBNS project was supported by the Joyce Foundation of Chicago.
May 18, 1995 Press Release for CBNS Report "Quantitative Estimation of the Entry of Dioxins, Furans and Hexachlorobenzene into the Great Lakes from Airborne and Waterborne Sources" Released by Environmental Media Services, Washington D.C.
CBNS
Queens College, CUNY
Flushing, NY 11367
Phone: 718-670-4180
Fax: 718-670-4189
For Release May 18, 1995
Dioxin -- the dangerous and much studied environmental pollutant -- has created a new fallout problem.A report to be released May 18 shows for the first time that dioxin emitted from more than one thousand Canadian and U.S. sources -- chiefly incinerators that burn municipal, medical or hazardous waste -- spreads through the air over the entire country. Long-range transport, often covering more than 1,000 miles, deposits dioxin-contaminated dust everywhere, concludes the study by a team led by Dr. Mark Cohen and Dr. Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems (CBNS) at Queens College, the City University of New York.
The new findings explain why most human exposure is due to dairy foods and beef (as noted in the EPA's recent dioxin assessment) even though few of the farms that raise these foods are actually in the vicinity of dioxin-emitting incinerators. Dioxin moves through the air in either a vapor state or attached to a dust particle, depending on atmospheric conditions.
Dioxin is found in body fat and mother's milk. Dioxin levels in the U.S. population resulting from dioxin-contaminated food represent exposure high enough to cause serious defects during fetal development of the hormone, immune an nervous systems. This exposure also creates a lifetime cancer risk several hundred times greater than the risk -- one in one million -- that generally requires remedial regulatory action.
The CBNS study analyzed how dioxin reaches the Great Lakes (Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Ontario, Lake Erie and Lake Huron) from 1,329 sources throughout the U.S. and Canada. It found that as much half the deposits in the Great Lakes came from sources as far away as Texas and Florida, dispelling the belief that dioxin emissions are only a problem in the immediate vicinity of a source. Indeed, because the prevailing winds and weather patterns blow from West to East, Americans living in the Eastern United States have more of one of the most toxic components in their bodies than those living in the West, according to a 1987 EPA study.
CBNS researchers conducted the study by identifying numerous dioxin sources throughout the U.S. in 1993, estimating their emissions and by analyzing these data with an adapted, sophisticated computer program originally created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to trace accidental releases of radioactive materials. Dr. Mark Cohen of CBNS modified the NOAA computer program to follow the behavior the 17 toxic molecular forms of dioxin[1] (and a similar pollutant, hexachlorobenzene) under varying atmospheric conditions using the actual weather measurements across the U.S. in 1993.
The computer program then ranked each of the 1,329 sources according to their percentage contribution to the total amount of dioxin deposited in the Great Lakes. The top contributors, about one-twentieth of the sources, account for 85 percent of the amount deposited from the atmosphere. About 70 percent of the airborne dioxin deposited in the Great Lakes comes from the incineration of municipal and medical wastes. Another 20 percent comes from certain steel mill operations ("iron sintering") and the burning of hazardous waste.
Although half of the total amount of dioxin deposited in Lake Michigan comes from sources within 300 miles of the lake, the other half is transported from sources as far as 1,250 miles away. Top contributors to Great Lakes deposits include, for example, municipal waste incinerators from as far away as Florida and Utah and hazardous waste incinerators in Texas and Louisiana.
The report points out that there are important uncertainties about the characteristics of individual sources. For example, because direct emission measurements have been made on very few sources, and these vary widely, emissions per unit of operation must be estimated generically for an entire class of sources. While this uncertainty is unlikely to influence the ranking of the source classes, they may affect the ranking of individual sources. The report calls for further studies to remedy such gaps in source data.
The success of the dioxin-tracking computer programs means that it can also be used to trace dioxin from its many sources to the crops that feed dairy cows and beef cattle -- information necessary to shape remedial actions to reduce the present unacceptable level of dioxin contamination in the nation's food supply. Action could include switching municipal waste from incinerators to recycling programs; using autoclaves (a sterilization device) instead of incinerators to handle medical waste; and phasing out chemical production that generates chlorine-containing waste.
The study, supported by the Joyce Foundation, has created, for the first time, a detailed database listing 954 individual sources of dioxin by name, address, and their estimated annual emissions. Another 375 sources are grouped by state or province. The primary sources of dioxin are from burning chlorinated plastic (such as PVC) and other chlorine-containing petrochemical materials. Even burning wood in a home fireplace releases dioxin into the air, not because dioxin is a natural component of wood, but because dioxin produced by industrial sources has now become widespread in the environment, including trees.
The Great Lakes study could be re-run to determine the sources of dioxin deposition in any other place in the United States. The database and report are available to the public from CBNS.
[1] Dioxin is the common term for a group of 210 different forms of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and polychlorinated dibenzo-furans, of which 17 are toxic.
June 1996 (Release Date: June 26, 1996)
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This
document is becoming available in Adobe pdf format.This report describes the costs of using dioxin-free production technologies and analyzes the economic impacts of this transition for the industries that produce the majority of the dioxin emissions that fall into the Lakes: medical waste incineration; municipal waste incineration; iron sintering facilities; cement kilns that burn hazardous waste; pulp and paper mills
SUMMARY: June 1996
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Businesses: $10
Also Available on the Web in html [190K] or
adobe pdf [174K]
This summary report describes the chief results of a two-year CBNS study of the origin of dioxin entering the Great Lakes, and the economic feasibility of preventing this process. Full accounts of this work, including sources of data, methodology, the detailed results, and references can be found in the new report, "Zeroing Out Dioxin in the Great Lakes, and our earlier report:
May 1995
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