The conscientious citizens of
Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yoghurt
containers and other items into recycling bins.
But in the past three months,
half of these recyclables have been loaded on to trucks, taken to a
hulking incineration facility and burned, according to the city’s government.
It’s a situation being
replicated across the US as cities struggle to adapt to a recent ban by China on the import of
items intended for reuse.
The loss of this overseas
dumping ground means that plastics, paper and glass set aside for recycling by
Americans is being stuffed into domestic landfills or is simply burned in vast
volumes. This new reality risks an increase of plumes of toxic pollution
that threaten the largely black and Latino communities who
live near heavy industry and dumping sites in the US.
About 200 tons of recycling
material is sent to the huge Covanta
incineratorin Chester City, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, every
day since China’s import ban came into practice last year, the company says.
“People want to do the right
thing by recycling but they have no idea where it goes and who it impacts,”
said Zulene Mayfield, who was born and raised in Chester and now spearheads a
community group against the incinerator, called Chester Residents Concerned for
Quality Living.
“People in Chester feel
hopeless – all they want is for their kids to get out, escape. Why should we be
expendable? Why should this place have to be burdened by people’s trash and
shit?”
Some experts worry that
burning plastic recycling will create a new fog of dioxins that will worsen an
already alarming health situation in Chester. Nearly four in 10 children in the
city have asthma, while the rate of ovarian cancer is 64% higher than the rest
of Pennsylvania and lung cancer rates are 24% higher, according to state health statistics.
The dilemma with what to do
with items earmarked for recycling is playing out across the US. The country
generates more than 250m tons of waste a year, according to the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA), with about a third of this recycled and composted.
Until recently, China had been
taking about 40% of US paper, plastics and other recyclables but this
trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. In July 2017, China told the
World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang
laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own
mountains of waste.
Since January 2018, China
hasn’t accepted two dozen different recycling materials, such as plastic and
mixed paper, unless they meet strict rules around contamination. The imported
recycling has to be clean and unmixed – a standard too hard to meet for most
American cities.
It is “virtually impossible to
meet the stringent contamination standards established in China”, said a
spokeswoman for the city of Philadelphia, who added that the cost of recycling
has become a “major impact on the city’s budget”, at around $78 a ton. Half of
the city’s recycling is now going to the Covanta plant, the spokeswoman said.
There isn’t much of a domestic
market for US recyclables – materials such as steel or high-density plastics
can be sold on but much of the rest holds little more value than rubbish –
meaning that local authorities are hurling it into landfills or burning it in
huge incinerators like the one in Chester, which already torches around 3,510
tons of trash, the weight equivalent of more than 17 blue whales, every day.
“This is a real moment of
reckoning for the US because of a lot of these incinerators are aging, on their
last legs, without the latest pollution controls,” said Claire Arkin, campaign
associate at Global Alliance for
Incinerator Alternatives. “You may think burning plastic means ‘poof, it’s
gone’ but it puts some very nasty pollution into the air for communities that
are already dealing with high rates of asthma and cancers.”
Hugging the western bank of
the Delaware River, which separates Pennsylvania and
New Jersey, Chester City was once a humming industrial outpost, hosting Ford
and General Motors plants. Since the war, however, Chester has been hollowed
out, with an exodus of jobs ushering in an era where a third of people live in
poverty.
The industry that remains
emits a cocktail of soot and chemicals upon a population of 34,000 residents,
70% of them black. There’s a waste water treatment plant, a nearby
Kimberly-Clark paper mill and a medical waste facility. And then there’s
Covanta’s incinerator, one of the largest of its kind in the US.
Just a tiny fraction of the
trash burned at the plant is from Chester – the rest is funneled in via truck
and train from as far as New York City and North Carolina. The burning of trash
releases a host of pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides and
particulate matter, which are tiny fragments of debris that, once inhaled,
cause an array of health problems.
It’s difficult to single out
the exact cause of any cancer but a host of studieshave
identified possible links between air pollution and ovarian and breast cancers,
which are unusually prevalent in Chester. A 1995 report by
the EPA found that air pollution from local industry provides a “large
component of the cancer and non-cancer risk to the citizens of Chester”.
“There are higher than normal
rates of heart disease, stroke and asthma in Chester, which are all endpoints
for poor air,” said Dr Marilyn Howarth, a public health expert at the
University of Pennsylvania who has advised Chester activists for the past six
years.
Howarth said residents now
risk a worsened exposure to pollution due to increased truck traffic rumbling
through their streets, bringing recycling to the plant. Once burned, plastics
give off volatile organics, some of them carcinogenic.
“It is difficult to link any
single case of cancer, heart disease or asthma directly to a particular source.
However, the emissions from Covanta contain known carcinogens so they
absolutely increase the risk of cancer to area residents.”
Covanta say that pollution
controls, such as scrubbers in smokestacks, will negate toxins emitted by
recyclables. After passing through the emissions control system, the plant’s
eventual output is comfortably below limits set by state and federal regulators,
the company says,
with emissions of dioxins far better than the expected standard.
The company also argues that
incineration is a better option than simply heaping plastic and cardboard in
landfills.
“In terms of greenhouse gases,
it’s better sending recyclables to an energy recovery facility because of the
methane that comes from a landfill,” said Paul Gilman, Covanta’s chief
sustainability officer. “Fingers crossed Philadelphia can get their recycling
program going again because these facilities aren’t designed for recyclables,
they are designed for solid waste.”
Covanta and its critics agree
that the whole recycling system in the US will need to be overhauled to avoid
further environmental damage. Just 9% of plastic is recycled in the US, with
campaigns to push up recycling rates obscuring broader concerns about the
environmental impact of mass consumption, whether derived from recycled materials
or not.
“The unfortunate thing in the
United States is that when people recycle they think it’s taken care of, when
it was largely taken care of by China,” said Gilman. “When that stopped, it
became clear we just aren’t able to deal with it.”
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