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You might
ask: “If materials are going to go to the landfill or an
incinerator anyway, why not recover energy from them, either
by burning them or using the gases emitted as they degrade?”
There is
nothing wrong with capturing landfill gases. In fact, it is
very important that we do this in order to reduce their
impact on the global climate system and to prevent their
highly-toxic components (like dioxin, furans, PCBs, and
halogenated compounds) from poisoning the air. But capturing
and treating landfill gases ought to be part of the costs of
operating a landfill, just as the construction and
maintenance of a landfill liner and a leachate collection
system are. What the recycling and composting industries
take issue with is labeling MSW a “renewable” resource and
indirectly subsidizing its production. MSW contains a large
fraction of inorganic and otherwise non-renewable
resource-based products like plastics, glass, and metals.
Furthermore, the idea that MSW is “renewable” is based on
the assumption that our current practice of extracting
materials from the natural world, processing them into
consumer goods, and then burying the leftover or used-up
remains in a tomb in the ground is a sustainable practice.
In fact, it’s just the opposite. Finally, when landfilling
is made artificially cheaper by subsidies, wasting becomes
more attractive financially. This helps perpetuate a cycle
of environmental destruction.
Now,
let’s look at the practice of burning MSW to produce energy.
To the credit of the former Clinton Administration, no new
Waste-To-Energy (WTE) facilities have been built in the US
in six years. Why? Because these units are notoriously hard
to site and are responsible for tremendous air and water
pollution. Industrial incinerators, including WTE’s, are our
second-largest source of dioxin (dioxin is one of the most
toxic groups of substances ever studied and is implicated in
cancers and in reproductive and endocrine system damage),
and they emit 20% of our nation’s mercury-containing gases.
Producing
energy from waste is also inefficient and doesn’t fare well
when compared with other more sustainable and cleaner
methods of making energy available. The energy savings
realized through recycling and composting free up more
energy than burning paper and other organics to produce
energy. In other words, by extending the life of the
materials already in our system, we can “create” more energy
than we can by burning them. According to the Natural
Resources Defense Council, recycling a ton of paper saves
the equivalent of 2.3 to 4 barrels of oil, while
incinerating a ton of paper saves the equivalent of 2.2
barrels.
The
problem with the tax credits proposed in the Energy Tax
Policy Act is that they further subsidize a wasting system
that is already unfairly supported at the expense of
resource recovery efforts like recycling and composting.
Wasting, as a materials management “strategy,” is
artificially cheap and unreflective of the true
environmental costs it incurs. The Act would make it even
more so.
So what
shall we do? In addition to opposing any version of the
Energy Tax Policy Act that includes the incinerator and
landfill-gas capture tax credits, we need to renew our
efforts at keeping toxic materials out of the landfill and
recover as much of our discards as we can. In addition, we
need to change the “rules of the game” so that producers
take more responsibility for the waste they create and our
market prices accurately reflect the environmental costs of
producing our goods. In light of the terrorist attacks of
September 11, action on the Act will likely be postponed
until 2002. But whether dealt with now or later, the Energy
Tax Policy Act remains an important piece of legislation for
the future of recycling and composting efforts in the United
States. It warrants public scrutiny, and we’ll be keeping
tabs on it. |
