No Incinerator for Croydon

INFLAMMATION AND AIR POLLUTION

2010-07-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

Inflammation:
The final common pathway of metals and particulates (oxidative stress),allergens (asthma) and gases (noxes and ozone).The picture above shows leakage,the black lines, into inflammed tissues

Most people think of inflammation as a small red painful itchy lump, or a swollen knee or ankle. They think of it as local. A real flu gives a hint at how it can be a whole body response. You won’t hear about this in relation to air pollution from the newspapers, TV, parliament or government bodies. Plausible deniability is one of the reasons for “not knowing” why the body’s rhythms of inflammation make a nonsense of the way averages of pollution, and the general numbers game, are played out in London. Self-amplifying cascades are the order of the day. A single peak episode will trigger an unstoppable, uncontrollable immune reaction leaving the whole body more sensitive to the next lot of pollution and awash with activated cells, new cells breeding fast and swamped with little known hormones, some of which stay around for 24 hours or longer. When this pollution becomes long term, or when we have a long heat wave this gets really serious and leads to permanent scarring and damage. If a child has lived long enough in such conditions the lungs never grow properly, the wounded lungs scarring, if it is in the womb its development is affected.Low birth weight,preterm delivery and therefor infant mortality all rise in frequency. Most politicians prefer to talk about the end stage, dying early, rather than the damage that affects babies or youngsters for their whole life ahead.

INFLAMMATION 1 THE HORRIBLE HIDDEN HORMONES

2010-07-24T07:01:00.001-07:00

Inflammation 1 the horrible hidden hormones

These substances are not made by distinct, specialised glands, but by a variety of cells (see inflammation 2). The great majority of their actions are on site. In some cases they circulate in the blood to exert hormonal effects on distant organs and tissues involved on our defences, and also on the guerrilla army of cells that have moved from the blood into places like the brain, gut, heart and placenta to lie in wait for infection and ambush any viruses or bacteria.

a) cytokines (over a hundred), the interleukins
b) chemotaxins
c) kinins
d) Complement
e) Products of blood clotting
f) Histamine
g) Eicosanoids
h) Lysosomal enzymes and nitric oxide

You get the picture, you probably haven’t heard of many of these…but I haven’t made them up. A completely up to date textbook would list more, show up more connections, describe a bigger circulation.

If ordinary hormones are the long range parcel service, then cytokines start out as notes from next door neighbours, except that they are a windswept snowstorm of paper, of many colours.

They were the killers in Spanish Flu, and create the final stage of lethal Bird Flu. We need them to fight viruses and bacteria, and heal cuts and stings, but when they are switched on by the wrong things, or get too active, they get too damaging.

When the amounts are too high they stop being local (microscopic distances) and go global. They hang around for many hours, some for days others for weeks. They leave the lungs ready to react faster and more intensely to the next lot of pollution. This makes such biological nonsense of the common number averages used in counting pollution. Their switch is on/off, and gets more sensitive as the day goes on *see the nox/ozone graphs of lethal London levels.

INFLAMMATION 2 THE CELLS THAT TRY TOO HARD,SOMETIMES

2010-07-24T06:59:00.000-07:00

Inflammation 2 the the cells that try too hard, sometimes

Neutrophils chomp, send messages to dilate blood vessels and make them leaky

Basophils like mast cells,but in the blood, release histamine,a potent chemical

Eosinophils special parasite killers, and mediate allergic reactions

Monocytes…munchers,killer chemical secretors….move out of blood into all tissues, to become the guerrilla army

Lymphocytes…..memory recognition cells

B cells …start an antibody response

T cells…..killers

Plasma cells…..make antibodies

Macrophages (including the brain microglia), munchers,chemical killers,rubbish processors helping T cells learn what rubbish is

Mast cells release histamine and other chemicals in an on/off burst….anaphyllactic shock is when all their fireworks go off at once.

In the bloodstream there are a number of specialist white cells…recognition scouts, dispatch riders, memory cells and heavyweight munchers. They send orders and messages to each other, and when things get too hot their messages are carried to everywhere in the body (going global).Munchers are good at digesting bugs and worn out cells,they clean up stuff. But when its soot, or coal dust, or asbestos, or cigarette smoke or rock dust or fibreglass, or particulates, they just can’t…so they die….and their neighbours get the message to clean things up, eat the rubbish (literally), and fail again….
Once you see a smokers lung at post mortem, you never forget it. We have taken action against passive smoking…but not against air pollution to anything like the same extent.

INFLAMMATION 3 CHRONIC INFLAMMATION AND SCARRING

2010-07-24T06:57:00.000-07:00

Inflammation 3 Chronic Inflammation and Scarring,

(top) brain chronic inflammatory changes

(bottom) lung with spaces where air used to flow (arrowheads),scar tissue (arrows) and collections of white cells (star)

Lung, Brain, Heart and Placenta.

If the inflammation is bad enough or frequent enough the white cells and their messages can “reach the parts other beers cannot reach”, switch on their cousins in the brain, heart ( where lung blood reaches first) and womb. Probably lots of other places that have not been studied yet as well.

The wound healing part of inflammation takes place, and microscopic scarring, like any scars you have that you can see on your skin, but inside.

LETHAL LONDON LEVELS

2010-07-21T04:54:00.000-07:00

OZONE LEVELS PEAK IN THE HEAT

Lethal London Ozone levels have been recorded over the last few days, in the current heatwave.

The government, via DEFRA, love to blame the “foreign” transboundary air flowing from the industrial areas of Northern Europe…and see no reason to change transport policy here. They say only winds from the east cause pollution.

Since Monday 19th July 2010, the winds have been SW-SSW, and temperatures 28-29 degrees centigrade…..so the levels in London, shown above, are all our own work !!!

100 = 5% DAILY MORTALITY INCREASE
130 =6%
150 = 8%

180-190 = 10% DAILY DEATHS MOVE UP!

200 people a day die in London on an average day, so that's an extra 10, 12,16 or 20

A DAY...EVERY DAY THE LEVELS ARE HIGH

The average death rate for people over 55 (the elderly are much more at risk here) can go up from 9/100,000 to 20/100,000 in extended heatwaves....where ozone and temeperature combine.

For a fixed temeperature...the higher the ozone, the more die

For a fixed ozone level.... the higher the temperature the more die

The death rates are much higher amongst the working class in all cases.

Careful Disposal Of Fly Ash

2010-07-07T01:16:00.000-07:00

Yes,this is how a hazardous waste site in England is managing some of the most carcinogenic substances known to man.."carefully sealed containers"....I DON'T THINK SO !!!

Air Pollution and the Brain:Latest

2010-06-08T08:39:00.000-07:00

Inhaled pollutants may inflame more than the lungs
By Janet Raloff
May 22nd, 2010; Vol.177 #11 (p. 16)

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/58906/title/Destination_brain

Destination brain :Tiny inhaled motes can travel beyond the lungs; new research suggests these particles may ravage the brain.
When Lilian Calderón-Garcidueñas recruited children for a study probing the effects of air pollution, Ana was just 7. The trim girl with an above-average IQ of 113 “was bright, very beautiful and clinically healthy,” the physician and toxicologist recalls.
But now Ana (not her real name) is 11. And after putting her and 54 other children from a middle-class area of Mexico City through a new battery of medical and cognitive tests, Calderón-Garcidueñas found that something has been ravaging the youngsters’ lungs, hearts — and, especially troubling, their minds.
Brain scans and screening for chemical biomarkers in the blood pointed to inflammation affecting all parts of the brain, says Calderón-Garcidueñas, of the National Institute of Pediatrics in Mexico City and the University of Montana in Missoula. On MRI scans, white spots showed up in the prefrontal cortex. In the elderly, she says, such brain lesions tend to denote reduced blood flow and often show up in people who are developing dementias, including Alzheimer’s disease.
In autopsies of seemingly healthy Mexico City children who had died in auto accidents or other traumatic events, Calderón-Garcidueñas uncovered brain deposits of amyloid-beta and alpha-synuclein, proteins that serve as hallmarks of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Several years earlier, she had found similar abnormalities in homeless Mexico City dogs and exaggerated versions of the abnormalities in local 20- to 50-year-olds.
She has published studies linking the insidious changes to the metro region’s air quality. The area’s 20-plus million inhabitants make it one of the world’s largest megacities, a roughly 7,000-square-kilometer region choking with smog and particles containing carbon, metals and more (SN: 9/8/07, p. 152). Most are nanoparticles — too small to see but just the right size to migrate into tissues throughout the body. Further clouding the air are solvents and other reactive gases — as well as toxins contributed by livestock feces.
Scientists have known that air pollution can impair airways and blood vessels. The emerging surprise is what it might do to the brain. Increasingly, studies have been highlighting inflammation-provoking nanopollutants as a potential source of nerve cell damage.
Calderón-Garcidueñas has been correlating Mexico City’s stew of air pollutants with a suite of symptoms in people of all ages. In March in Salt Lake City at the annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology, Calderón-Garcidueñas unveiled some of her latest data. At age 11, Ana shows persistent, growing brain lesions, the toxicologist reported. As do the other Mexico City children surveyed. They also exhibit cognitive impairments in memory, problem solving and judgment and deficiencies in their sense of smell compared with age-matched children from a cleaner city 120 kilometers away.

Metals in the air Particles collected from the air above Mexico City (two shown) contain metals including manganese, iron, zinc, tin, lead and mercury (labeled). New research suggests that the particles can end up in the brain.Kouji Adachi and Peter R. Buseck/Environmental Sci. Technol. 2010
Other toxicologists at the meeting presented data, largely from animal studies, tracking the movement of billionth-of-a-meter–scale particles into the brain, where they triggered inflammation and abnormalities characteristic of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
Until recently, most air pollution toxicology has focused on impacts to the lungs and heart, observes James Antonini of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s lab in Morgantown, W. Va. The challenge now, he says, is to identify which pollutants are harming the nervous systems of Ana and others who live in areas with particularly dirty air.
Fuzzy thinking
Mexico City is not the only source of real-world pollution that has been linked to mental impairments.
Ulrich Ranft and colleagues at the Environmental Health Research Institute at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, studied 400 or so highly functioning local women in their mid- to late 70s. Elderly women who lived within 50 meters of very busy streets exhibited poorer memory skills than did women of the same age whose homes were well removed from highly trafficked roadways, the team reported in the November 2009 Environmental Research.
The study turned up no similar link between cognitive scores and average levels of particles in the women’s communities. That makes sense, Ranft says, because the levels of ultrafine motes emitted by traffic can be quite high along streets, “but drop off very fast, falling to almost background levels when you get just 100 meters away from the road.”
Young children’s minds may be especially sensitive to tiny airborne particles spewed by traffic, according to Shakira Franco Suglia of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and her colleagues. In studies of roughly 200 Boston 10-year-olds, the researchers found that those living in areas with the highest average airborne concentrations of soot, a pollutant primarily associated with traffic, had lower IQs and lower scores on memory tests.

From nostril to brain
The team divided the kids by exposure levels into four groups. The average IQ drop between one group and the next averaged about three points — comparable to that seen in kids whose mothers had smoked during pregnancy, Franco Suglia’s group reported in 2008 in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Taking note of non-scents
A few studies, including the recent one by Ranft’s group, have also observed a somewhat impaired sense of smell among people living in polluted regions.
At the toxicology meeting, Calderón-Garcidueñas reported that kids and young adults in Mexico City have a somewhat worse sense of smell than those living in cleaner cities. Roberto Lucchini of the University of Brescia in Italy reported much the same for adolescents living in communities around now-closed iron-alloy manufacturing plants. Both groups’ data also turned up signs the youngsters have been experiencing at least subtle nerve damage.
The findings, the researchers say, are especially worrisome since a number of studies have shown that a sense of scents wanes in people developing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Though metal pollution hasn’t been confirmed as a cause of these diseases, Lucchini was able to link pollution in Brescia to reduced smelling abilities and to motor impairments.
Until 2001, alloy plants in northern areas of the province spewed a number of metals into the air. Manganese remains a substantial pollutant in the air, soil and house dust in this part of Italy. Work by Lucchini’s team uncovered unusually high rates of symptoms including tremors, slowed movement and rigidity among adults living near the now-defunct plants. The local prevalence of these and other Parkinson’s-like symptoms is about 400 per 100,000 inhabitants. That’s two and a half times the usual rate in Italy.

Unnerving signs: Diffuse amyloid plaques (brown blotches), like those seen in Alzheimer's patients (top), have shown up in adults (middle) and children (bottom) from Mexico City. L. Calderon-Garciduenas
Lucchini’s team, which had already planned to examine 300 middle schoolers for neural effects of local pollution, included a smell assay in the tests. To measure exposures, the researchers collected blood and urine from the 11- to 13-year-olds. A third of the kids also carried a backpack fitted with an air-sampling device and a GPS to pair up readings and precise locations. Some children lived near the former alloy plants, others at Garda Lake, a relatively clean comparison region in the province.
At the toxicology meeting, Lucchini reported that among kids living near the alloy plants, “Odor identification was clearly impaired compared to children living in the [Garda Lake] region.” The smell-threshold reduction was “preclinical,” he explains, meaning the children wouldn’t notice the change but it could be picked up with testing.
His team also linked exposures to manganese-rich dust particles with motor impairments — such as a reduction in the speed at which children could clench their hands or sequentially touch the fingers of each hand to the thumb. Though it’s too early to speculate about whether the symptoms will evolve into something resembling Parkinson’s disease, Lucchini says, these are the first data to link such motor impairments to inhaled manganese.
Nosing out the problem
While these data are just coming in, a growing body of evidence suggests that nerves in the nose can provide a highway along which some inflammatory pollutants, such as metals, motor directly from the outside world to the brain.
How efficient the conduit is varies by pollutant particle, according to new experiments by Wolfgang Kreyling of the Helmholtz Center and the German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich. In rats, 20-nano-meter–diameter agglomerations of at least 100 radioactively labeled iridium particles entered the brain whether inhaled through the nose or pumped directly into the lungs.
By comparing what has been deposited after one-hour exposures via the two routes, Kreyling’s team showed that for such small particles, two-thirds of what ends up in the rat brain comes directly from the nose, the rest via a more circuitous route that starts in the lungs, moves into the bloodstream and then goes to the brain.
Well under 1 percent of inhaled particles made it to the brain via either route, Kreyling reported at the toxicology meeting. However, he added, once those insoluble particles arrive in the brain, “we do not see much clearance.” So continuous exposure over time could leave substantial amounts of inflammatory particles in the brain, he speculates.
Change the 20-nanometer iridium to same-sized soot particles and the uptake rate falls by 75 percent. Expose animals to 20-nanometer particles made from titanium dioxide or to 80-nanometer particles of iridium, and the rate of brain uptake drops by about 90 percent.
But no one’s sure how well such studies model what happens in people, points out David Dorman of North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Long-snouted rodents depend far more than humans do on the sense of smell and have evolved a much bigger and more efficient system linking the outside environment to the brain. For instance, Dorman notes that half of the nasal cavity of a rat is lined with olfactory-system cells. In humans, this receptive area is much smaller, he says — “only about 3 to 5 percent.”
His team has shown that even for particles that begin moving up the olfactory highway, some stop partway. One type that does seem to go the distance: manganese. When Dorman’s group exposed rats to manganese, the same metal that taints the dust Lucchini has been studying in Italy, nearly all of the pollutant particles entering the nasal tissue migrated at least as far as the olfactory bulb, a structure in the brain.
Regardless of what percentage of particles make it all the way, such data suggest that inhaled airborne motes can enter the brain, where they would be expected to foster inflammation, a primary underlying trigger of tissue damage and neurodegenerative disease.
Moreover, Calderón-Garcidueñas has linked the pollutants with a breakdown in the lining of the nose, which could facilitate particles’ access to olfactory highways serving the brain.
A burning issue
Although the source and chemistry of air pollutants affecting the brain differ, all seem to share the same toxic modus operandi: inflammation. Some pollutants turn on genes that release inflammatory chemicals, others call out immune cells that quash invaders and clean up trash using inflammatory mechanisms. Still more induce biologically destructive electron-stripping chemical reactions that won’t quiet down without a copious release of antioxidants.
Krishnan Sriram, a neurotoxicologist with NIOSH, reported at the toxicology meeting that following 10-day and 28-week exposures to manganese welding-fume particles, rodents developed brain changes resembling many of those in Parkinson’s patients — nerve-cell inflammation, tissue damage from oxidation and loss of nerve cells from a region of the brain that makes dopamine.
In addition, his team looked at some of the family of Park genes; mutations in these genes are associated with an elevated risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. In rodents exposed to manganese, the researchers saw a reduction in the genes’ production of proteins that normally help rid the body of misshapen nerves and that quash the oxidation responsible for excessive inflammation.
Bellina Veronesi of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Lung-Chi Chen of the New York University School of Medicine laboratory in Tuxedo reported data at the toxicology meeting from mice exposed to dense concentrations of pollutants collected from outdoor air. Animals without functioning apolipoprotein genes, which normally help control the production and activity of certain fats in the bloodstream, experienced runaway brain inflammation and nerve damage. This finding suggests that properly working apolipoproteins may be essential for coping with tiny inhaled particles.
People born with a particular apolipoprotein gene variant — known as APOE-4 — face a greatly elevated risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer’s disease and more general cognitive declines. In North America, Calderón-Garcidueñas says, roughly one-fifth of people carry this variant. And in Mexico City, she has found that children and young adults with the variant exhibit the most inflammation, the greatest cognitive declines and the most rapid deposition of amyloid-beta.
But Calderón-Garcidueñas has yet to prove that deposition in the brain of air particles primarily explains the brain inflammation she’s measured, says Dorman. One has to wonder, he says, whether the “widespread nasal damage” that she depicted was a major contributor to inflammatory brain damage or independent of it.
Calderón-Garcidueñas is aware of the issue. She notes that work by others has shown that inflammation-provoking cells or chemicals have the potential to migrate from distant sites into the brain, triggering fallout damage there.

CHERNOBYL 2........TWIN PEAKS

2010-06-03T02:46:00.000-07:00

Chernobyl 2……… Twin Peaks

4,000 or 2,000,000

I am using my last contribution to this blog to highlight the massive international cover-up of this massive international disaster. The difference between those figures is not a measure of any scientific margin of error, it is a measure of the extent of politically motivated minimisation. It exists to make the prospect of future nuclear power stations more easily defendable, the production of future bombs more affordable and the expedient scandal of misinformation since Hiroshima more apparently consistent.

I was going to go into long paragraphs of technical detail to show why figures around the 1,000,000 mark are reasonable: the huge extent of the spread, the intense, low atmosphere, radioactivity post-fire (not shot up to decay and dissipate in the stratosphere, as in a bomb), many varied and different radioactive elements, short, medium and very long term ( like Americium and Plutonium of exceptionally long lasting toxicity) , the numerous hotspots of radioactivity levels, the lottery of hot particle ingestion, the food-chain concentration and ecological recycling. But all are true and measured.

The mortality of the very many liquidators has been hidden, the Europe wide effects on pregnancy and infant mortality are in scattered publications, until this book. The causes of a second peak of infant mortality a year or two later has been speculated on as being due to the importation of Russian beef, by German research. Other potential reasons can only be more chilling. The carcinogenicity figures aren’t only the thyroid cancers and leukaemias popularly counted, they move to the 20 year delay and variety seen post the Japanese bombs. The toll of general ill-health, particularly amongst children is painful to see described.

It seems to me that the reason large potential for poisonings is both irremediable and so worrying is that it involves human beings and their capacity to be ignorant, greedy, drunk, asleep or incompetent. Sellafield mismanagement, the Chernobyl accident, Gilly-sur-Isere, the Finnish (Polish plumber) nuclear fiasco, Three-mile island, Exxon Valdez, and now BP in the Gulf of Mexico all show what boys will do with their toys when they decide not to read the instructions (or not to understand the instructions if they do read them).The prefects then make up stories of all sorts to avoid being sued, having to pay compensation or worst of all, having to lose face massively for not being up to the job. For the narcissistic, psychopathic, political class we have bred recently this will simply not be allowed to happen. Everything will be for the best, in the best of all possible worlds, run by the brightest, most knowledgeable and incorruptible of all governments. Boy, will WE need to be lucky!

EURO-FLAW 2

2010-05-24T03:05:00.000-07:00

In a further deliberate attempt to disguise the real cost of incineration, and maintain the truly crazy drive to globalised companies' profits, the EU parliament continues the policy to ease controls on pollution measurments.WHAT'S TO HIDE ?? !!

http://ukwin.org.uk/2010/05/05/euro-parliament-votes-to-decrease-monitoring-incinerator-pollution/

The latest press release shows how ultra-fine particulates, dioxins and heavy metals are being made to "disappear".

They are even falling behind on their scurrilous "best we can manage" safety promise.They are refusing to measure with the latest technology.

How expendable do you feel?

DOES IT MATTER HOW LONG YOU LIVE IN BAD AIR?

2010-05-14T09:29:00.000-07:00

Does it matter how long you live in bad air?

Yes it does….the effects on pregnancy are seen immediately, i.e. delayed by nine months. Then you can see rises in ill health as the pollution levels last into days. In the last eight years or so a number of very long term studies have shown even higher levels of mortality the longer people have lived in bad air. You can see the mortality increasing till at least 10 years. One Dutch study showed a 20% rise in mortality.

British government figures on “safety” had one of those hidden assumptions buried away in them. That no one ever lived in one spot longer than five years…..you can see why they wanted to cheat on that one! Of course it is the most vulnerable elderly that stay put, and the poor who can’t move out of the polluted housing front line, whence all but they have fled.

If you've speny all your childhood in bad air...to age twenty...you never recover your lung capacity.This renders sufferers much more liable to serious problems earlier than otherwise..a sort of premature ageing of resilience.

MAY 2010 INTERNATIONAL POLLUTION UPDATE

2010-05-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Air pollution, from traffic, industry, the new incinerator programme and summer ozone peaks doesn't sound sexy yet, but the first hot summer death peaks will be as devastating to denialists as the 2007 summer floods were to water engineers.

For example, why do you think that the government has gone to such great lengths to cover up its correspondence with Boris over London air?

follow the link and find out more:

http://www.cleanairinlondon.org/blog/_archives/2010/4/28/4516369.html

Both the American Lung:

http://www.stateoftheair.org/2010/health-risks/

and American Heart associations:

have new reports and position statements:

http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/reprint/CIR.0b013e3181dbece1

you could note the widespread immumne system disturbances ((illus.p2353) which explain the otherwise mysterious wide variety of effects, from pregnancy to brain damage.

Bloomberg show how badly London has been (and will be) doing in comparison to Athens and Frankfurt.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aSMaNlWQcqIo&pid=20601087

The article also highlights how the new measurement methods will appear to "reduce" air pollution. Same air, same awful mortality, just new, "fresh" numbers designed to fool the Eu commissioners into allowing further delays in cleaning things up.
You have reported the HOC environment audit committee report.....nothings changed though...traffic is still growing...and the number of incinerators and biomass burn stations in the pipeline is quite shoocking.

Did you know that only £ 10,000 pounds stands between reassuring or condemning research:

http://www.ukwin.org.uk/files/pdf/HAGATI_Research_Plea.pdf

As Sahsu collects all these figures anyway, and modern number crunching computer systems can spot clusters a mile away, on auto pilot at no extra cost, why hasn't the HPA done, or allowed others to do, the research?
Thjis field is wide open for a Guardian special...there is a new minister for the environment...go for it Guardian!

THE SMOG OF LONDON,INVISIBLE,"SIMPLES"

2010-05-10T03:49:00.000-07:00

A recent article from Bloomberg's Alex Morales,shows London's dire position.It is available at:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?sid=aSMaNlWQcqIo&pid=20601087

Please note that he has noticed the trick of changing the measurement methods as a way of presenting the same air as "cleaner"...the mortality figures are of course still the same!!!

AND DISGRACEFULLY HIGH!!!

The WHO recommended figures would put the red exceedance line still lower,and thus show that we breathe dangerously polluted air for even more days of the year than are shown in the graph above.Birmingham's air is at least as bad.

£10,000 POUNDS...out of billions in the industry!..............??????

2010-04-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

£10,000 ………..would you believe that that is the difference between knowing that incinerators are safe for the surrounding population, with some peace of mind…or knowing that they are a dangerous, though very profitable, irrelevance.

Experienced, very competent, scientific experts are ready, the relevant data has been collected, automatically, for decades. It just remains to be analysed appropriately.

I am sure that Professor Elliott, the pioneer of early British incinerator research, would be shocked that his work is being used to justify all sorts of safety around incinerators, when it only dealt with rare cancers. He would be the first to acknowledge, I am sure, that the extensive work around the damage that particulate air pollution does, since his papers were first published, means that more work needs doing.

In fact, as he is the head of the SAHSU at Imperial College, where all these statistics are collected, he must be very frustrated that somehow a roadblock has occurred over this business. SAHSU must be independent of DEFRA, the EA and the HPA, surely, and cannot tolerate the dead hand of authority preventing the vital development of knowledge in this field.

This is the link to the appeal for money…and to an excellently prepared objection to an EA permit for incineration, from very senior scientists.

http://www.ukwin.org.uk/files/pdf/HAGATI_Research_Plea.pdf

FIVE BOROUGHS ON THE POLITICS SHOW

2010-04-12T00:17:00.000-07:00

Slip of the tongue or a new strategy? Who is the lucky newcomer? If its got too hot to handle in the four boroughs,is it the fifth borough that's going to get it...you know ...that thing that burns,smokes and ashes like a duck....!

What are the new democratic structures that are supposed to have an oversight of this very very murky process...what ?...none at all?

Piecemeal,salami sliced hazardous waste burner strategies.Perhaps the election should be a referendum on this patronising,secretive, oh so profitable rubbish!

LOW IMPACT LOOPHOLES

2010-04-08T02:42:00.000-07:00

I am going to devote this blog to the developing investigation of low impact loopholes.As more info comes in from different sources it will be added in chronological order.

1

It would most likely be cheaper in both the immediate and longer term -
immediate as EA permit applications cost money to process and to complete (consultancy fees, etc.)
and in the longer term they might avoid reporting and inspection costs, etc.

of course there may be more to it, as all of these costs are relatively marginal (UKWIN,6.4.10)

2....

LOW IMPACT:HOC:CHIMNEYS AND LORRIES II

2010-03-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Low impact loopholes: HOC on local authorities :Lorries and Chimneys again

Some developers go to extraordinary lengths to have their proposals labelled low impact…this means that the planning procedures are quicker because they can be judged by environmental health officers and ordinary development committees.
Otherwise they would have to be referred to the Environment Agency for approval. Are there any other differences? Watch this space for further investigations.

There were worrying assertions made by the Road Transport Laboratory (Dr. Mcrae) that environmental health officers were overstretched, had to wear too many hats, and were simply not funded well enough to put through changes that bad air quality figures merited. There were suggestions that not enough liason existed between local authorities’ traffic departments and their environmental health departments.

You can watch his evidence on the link below, particularly Joan Walleys comments at 4 mins 30 sec:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m13_xTkqROI

HOC Report Summary

Poor air quality reduces the life expectancy of everyone in the UK by an average of seven to
eight months and up to 50,000 people a year may die prematurely because of it. Air
pollution also causes significant damage to ecosystems. Despite these facts being known air
quality is not seen as a priority across government and the UK is failing to meet a range of
domestic and European targets.
The quantified costs of poor air quality that are used to develop policy are out-dated. They
do not take account of all the known health effects, treatment costs, and environmental
damage, nor do they take account of fines that could be imposed by the EU for failing to
meet air quality targets. Many Government departments do not seem fully to understand
how their policies affect air quality, the impact poor air quality has, and its cost to the
economy. Awareness of the issue needs to be raised at all levels of government, and policies
need to take greater account of air quality impacts.
Awareness needs to be raised and behaviour needs to change if air quality targets are to be
met. Transport causes the most exposure to harmful air pollutants, and air quality targets
will not be met without a significant shift in transport policy. Local authorities need to do
more to tackle poor air quality, and they must be given information on how to develop
local air quality strategies.
The cost-benefit analysis is clear: what is needed is the political will to make this a priority
and to commit the resources to address it now so that we can reap the benefits of improved
health.

The report fails to notice the problem of lorries and chimneys

2. Industry and road transport are the main sources of air pollution, though domestic
combustion and agriculture are also to blame. Industry is a major source of emissions of
NOX (46%) and PM10 (36%). Road transport contributes to significant emissions of NO2
(30%) and PM10 (18%). Emissions and exposure vary greatly depending on location.
Although polluting, the majority of large combustion plants ***are located away from major
urban centres. Road transport contributes far more to the public’s exposure to pollutants
and is responsible for up to 70% of air pollution in urban areas.
***But Beddington is to have two!!

THE BEDDINGTON WASTE HUB

2010-03-15T12:42:00.000-07:00

South of us the well-heeled and well connected citizens of CAPEL,REIGATE and REDHILL have each blocked proposals for their local incinerators.Good for them!!!

Now the different population of Beddington must rely on their democratically elected representatives to protect them from becoming the epicentre of waste management for South London and the Home Counties. The removal of these alternatives mean that there will be ever increasing pressure on the SLWP to manage MUCH, MUCH, MORE than the local waste streams.Certainly more profitable for the contractors...but a risky business for the villagers.

"Sensitive Receptors" or guinea-pigs

2010-03-12T02:00:00.000-08:00

In European legislation the prime sensitive receptor is the 6 year old girl. This is because it is judged that she will have accumulated enough dioxins by the time she becomes pregnant to damage the foetus, or breast cancer, if levels are high enough. Dioxins act like hormones, so very, very, very tiny amounts are damaging…..mini-millionths of ¼ teaspoon of sugar, say.
Play the game of spot your school playground (the plume will reach much further than this picture, approx 5 Km….not 1 Km as the report counts.)
Winds mean that the plume will be skewed to the North-East..i.e. over Croydon.

R7…Culvers House Primary School
R8….Hackbridge Primary School
R9 Carew Manor School
R10…Beddington Park Primary School
R11 Archbishop Lanfranc School
R12 Gonville Primary School.

Dioxins are measured at only one site in London, and Heavy metals at three, alongside roads, primarily for measuring lead from petrol, now they are being closed because of lead free petrol. Industry pressure has lead to European laws that used to measure these to be dropped, relying on the much weaker term Best Available Technologies…. Yes it is BATS isn’t it!

Fallujah,another name for dioxins and heavy metals

2010-03-04T01:39:00.000-08:00

Now that the beeb have got it at last it is unlikely to go away.Don't the Americans have a bare faced cheek..."always interested in public health..don't have any official reports"...not unlike the SLWP though,come to think of it!It is likely to be the various forms of uranium in the munitions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XExbH673R3A&feature=related

BAD DAY FOR BEDDINGTON VILLAGE,BAD DAY FOR DEMOCRACY

2010-03-01T23:33:00.001-08:00

Beddington Lane is on the frontline of incinerator development. In a secret agreement between the SLWP and Viridor in June 2009 the conditions of the licence were varied without Sutton’s planning committee approval. This means that lorries have been going to the site 24/7…60 extra movements a night, Saturday night and all day Sunday. It’s the thin end of a very dangerous wedge, as waste transfer sites are notorious for the extra dangers of their high trace metal content dusts.In September 2009 Country waste was allowed to up its tonnages from 200,00 to 350,000.In February 2010 a tarmac recycling plant was approved (with its lorries).In March new incinerator plans upped the 350,000 tons to 500,000 tons. Although the decision at last week’s committee was “deferred”, the lorries still rumble.
Questions were raised about whether Sutton could even change the status quo, “as they were now part of a partnership”…..so SLWP trumps local democracy then! Who will fight for the health of the village’s pregnancies and playgrounds? As one of Beddington North’s ward councillors is also chairman of that planning committee that may make for difficulties. Watch this space!
The second, new, monitoring station (Therapia Lane) is so far away from both the waste site entrance and village that it seems almost deliberately designed to miss measuring the serious health picture.

Healthy Babies Need Clean Air

2010-02-12T02:22:00.000-08:00

BIG RISE IN VERY SERIOUS ALLERGIES

2010-02-07T08:17:00.001-08:00

No, I haven’t gone all flaky or new-age on you. Below is a very serious report from today’s Observer about the rise of serious allergic reactions in the wrong people! Certainly not what we were taught in the seventies. The consultant mentions the possibility of environmental causes, so we should watch that space!

In the past year alone, there were more than 30,000 admissions to hospital of those suffering anaphylaxis. Medications for allergies cost almost £1bn annually, 11% of the total NHS drug budget.

In the past seven years, there has been a fourfold increase in all allergies, according to the British Society for Allergy and Clinical Immunology (BSACI), the national allergy body.

Moira Austin, helpline manager at Anaphylaxis Campaign, said she has noted an increase in the number of women seeking help for allergies. "It tends to be women who become allergic around the time of the menopause or after a stay in hospital. It comes on suddenly and involves foods they have eaten happily for their entire life," she said.

Experts say that a large proportion of these admissions involving "new onset" patients, who are experiencing a severe reaction to a food, medication or drug with which they have never previously had a problem, or never come into contact before.
Pam Ewan, a consultant allergist at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge, and a member of the National Allergy Strategy Group, said: "The rise in numbers is to do with a raised general awareness of allergies, but we are, as a population, becoming more allergic overall.

"What I have very certainly seen over the past three to five years is an increase in the number of older adults developing allergies for the first time," she added. "Allergies usually start in childhood and young adulthood, so this is a very surprising new trend and very hard to explain. It is so new, however, and there are so few allergists in the UK, that we have not yet even started collecting data, much less analysing it.
"It could be to do with changes in our environment, a change in allergen exposure, pollution or diet. The only thing we know is that it is clearly related to modern, western ways of living."
The number of people at risk from severe and fatal allergic reactions has increased sharply every year for the past 15 years, according to new NHS figures. The number of adults developing potentially lethal new allergies for the first time has also accelerated dramatically.

The figures reveal an unprecedented year-on-year increase in the number of prescriptions issued to those at risk of the most serious allergic reaction, known as anaphylactic shock. The most common triggers are allergies to eggs, nuts, fish, dairy products, fruit and vegetables, and latex. Potentially fatal reactions to insect stings are also increasingly common, as are dramatically adverse reactions to drugs and medication.

Emergency drug use has shown a rise of more than 700% in 13 years.

CORPORATE MODELS AND WASTE

2010-02-03T00:24:00.000-08:00

The SLWP is not only considering a Joint Waste Authority model in its contractual arangements but also a corporate model.This includes a new company or LLP formation,shareholder holdings and procurement contracts.Soon we get even more commercial confidentiality considerations and secrecy rather than openness.Seeing how really open the process has been so far that cannot be reassuring in the slightest.

EXPLODING CONCRETE AND INCINERATOR BOTTOM ASH

2010-02-03T00:12:00.000-08:00

Exploding concrete banned:Workers harmed

Contractors are banning foam concrete on civil sites after two explosions left construction workers with fractured feet. The blasts were linked to the use of incinerator bottom ash (IBA) in foam concrete. At least two contractors – Barhale and Enterprise – have banned foam concrete containing IBA from all their sites, with others understood to be following suit.

Well, we now read that the Highways Agency have issued a guidance note (Interim Advice Note 127/09 The Use Of Foamed Concrete) in which they advise that “foamed concrete containing IBA must not be used on any Highways Agency contracts from the date of this document until the HSE investigations are complete“.

IBA,apparently contains aluminium (which means it contains lots of heavy metal poisons as well)which reacts to form explosive gases.You really couldn't make it up!
(Courtesy of UKWIN)

BAD STUFF BY THE TON that comes out of some CHIMNEYS especially those CO- BURNING HAZARDOUS WASTE

2010-01-26T14:54:00.000-08:00

Information Supplied by The Air That We Breathe Group
(Courtesy of UKWIN)

Operator Site Address Licence
Lafarge Industries TROWBRIDGE ROAD, WESTBURY, WILTSHIRE BL7752IT
Process CEMENT AND LIME Manufacture

Material Maximum Reported Emission 1998 – 2006 Effects on Human Health

Ammonia
22.5t Excessive exposure to ammonia may affect the eye, lung, nose, skin and throat.
Boron
17453kg Excessive exposure to boron and its compounds may affect the brain, digestive system, eye, kidney, liver, lung, nose, reproductive system, skin, throat and the unborn child.
Metals
Antimony
10.4kg Excessive exposure to antimony may affect the digestive system, eye, heart, kidney, lung and skin.
Arsenic
4.2kg Arsenic and some of its compounds may cause cancer and genetic damage. Excessive exposures may affect the blood, blood vessels, brain, digestive system, lung, peripheral nerve and skin.
Beryllium
3.43kg Excessive exposure to beryllium may affect the eye, lung and skin, and may cause cancer.
Cadmium
2.7kg Excessive exposure to cadmium and its compounds may affect the blood, blood vessels, bone, digestive system, heart, immune system, kidney, liver and lung, and may cause cancer. Danger of serious damage to health by prolonged exposure through inhalation and if swallowed. Possible risk of irreversible effects.
Chromium
62.2kg Chromium and its compounds may cause cancer and genetic damage. Excessive exposure may affect the digestive system, kidney, liver, lung, nose, skin and the unborn child.
Copper
29.9kg Excessive exposure to copper and its compounds may affect the digestive system, eye, kidney, liver, lung and nose.
Lead
100kg Lead and some of its compounds may affect the development of the brain in children and the unborn child. Excessive exposure may affect the blood, blood vessels, digestive system, kidney, peripheral nerve, reproductive system and the unborn child, and may cause cancer.
Manganese
100kg Excessive exposure to manganese and its compounds may affect the brain, liver, lung, reproductive system and skin.
Mercury
20.44kg Excessive exposure to mercury and its compounds may affect the brain, digestive system, eye, heart, kidney, lung, reproductive system, skin, and the unborn child.
Nickel
103.83kg Nickel may cause cancer and genetic damage.Excessive exposure to nickel may affect the blood, lung, nose, reproductive system, skin and the unborn child.
Selenium
200kg Excessive exposure to selenium and its compounds may affect the brain, digestive system, eye, heart, liver, lung, peripheral nerve, reproductive system, skin, throat.
Vanadium
100kg Excessive exposure to vanadium compounds may affect the digestive system, eye, liver, skin, throat and the unborn child, and may cause cancer.
Zinc
100kg Excessive exposure to zinc compounds may affect the blood, digestive system, eye, kidney, lung, pancreas, reproductive system, skin and the unborn child.
Ozone 50kg Excessive exposure to ozone may affect the eye and lung.
Carbon dioxide
716004.2t Major contributor to climate change. Climate changes will inevitably influence the health of those directly affected.
Carbon dioxide – ‘chemical’
326000t
Carbon dioxide – ‘thermal’
307000t
Carbon monoxide
678.7t Excessive exposure to carbon mono
xide may affect the blood, brain, heart, and the unborn child.
Nitrogen oxides (as NO2)
3447.7t Excessive exposure to nitrogen oxides may affect the blood, liver, lung and spleen.
Nitrous oxide
15800kg
Sulphur oxides (as SO2)
1685t Excessive exposure to sulphur dioxide may affect the eye, lung and throat.
Hydrogen chloride
52.46t Excessive exposure to hydrogen chloride may affect the eye, lung, nose, skin and throat.
Inorganic chlorine compounds 52466kg
Hydrogen cyanide
<200kg A poisonous gas that affects the central nervous system and can cause death if the exposure is high enough. May cause brain damage at lower than lethal concentrations.
Hydrogen fluoride
<5000kg Potential symptoms of overexposure are irritation of eyes, nose and throat; pulmonary edema; skin and eye burns; nasal congestion; bronchitis.
Inorganic fluorine compounds <5000kg Can cause fluorosis – may damage teeth and bones if exposed to excessive concentrations
Particulate matter
– total 147.91t
PM10 69.5t Particulates affect the heart and lung. COMEAP have concluded that there is an effect on health from any particulate matter.
Methane 50.1t Excessive exposure to methane may affect the brain.

VOC and POP
Volatile Organic Compounds include a large number of toxic chemicals some effects are listed below under the individual chemicals. No one knows the effect of small quantities of lots of organic chemicals acting together.
VOCs (as C) (1998-2001)
268.9t
VOCs (NMVOCs) (2002 onwards)
84t
Benzene
4367.02kg Benzene may cause cancer and genetic damage. Excessive exposure may affect the blood, brain, heart, immune system, liver, lung and skin. Toxic: danger of serious damage to health by prolonged exposure through inhalation
Butadiene (1,3-Butadiene)
<100kg 1,3-Butadiene may cause cancer and genetic damage. Excessive exposure may affect the blood, brain, eye, heart, kidney, lung, nose and throat.
Styrene
<100kg Excessive exposure to styrene may affect the blood, brain, eye, immune system, kidney, liver, lung, skin and throat.
Carbon disulphide
<1000kg Excessive exposure to carbon disulphide may affect the brain, eye, heart, liver, lung, reproductive system, skin, and the unborn child.
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
There is rapidly increasing body of evidence supporting the conclusion that carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) produce severe, long-term immunotoxicity. This may be related to the structure of the carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons since immune alterations have not been observed following exposure to noncarcinogenic congeners. Evidence exists to indicate that mixtures of PAHs are carcinogenic in humans. The evidence in humans comes primarily from occupational studies of workers exposed to mixtures containing PAHs as a result of their involvement in such processes as coke production, roofing, oil refining, or coal gasification (e.g., coal tar, roofing tar, soot, coke oven emissions, soot, crude oil)… . PAHs, however, have not been clearly identified as the causative agent. Cancer associated with exposure to PAH-containing mixtures in humans occurs predominantly in the lung and skin following inhalation and dermal exposure, respectively. Some ingestion of PAHs is likely because of swallowing of particles containing PAHs subsequent to mucociliary clearance of these particulates from the lung.
PAHs (borneff six)
630.88kg
Benzo(a)Pyrene
<1kg Benzo(a)pyrene may cause cancer and genetic damage. Excessive exposure may affect the blood, immune system, reproductive system and the unborn child. May cause heritable genetic damage; May impair fertility;
Benzo(b)fluoranthene
<1kg probable human carcinogen, increased incidences of skin, lung, bladder & gastrointestinal cancer. Pregnant women may be especially susceptible to exposure effects associated with coal tar pitch volatiles like benzo(b)fluoranthene and other pahs.
Benzo(g,h,i)perylene
<1kg Possibly genotoxic
Benzo(k)fluoranthene <1kg probable human carcinogen.
Chrysene
<10kg probable human carcinogen. Pregnant women may be especially susceptible to exposure effects associated with coal tar pitch volatiles. Persons with existing skin disorders may be more susceptible to the effects of coal tar pitch volatiles
Indeno(1,2,3-cd)pyrene
<1kg The agent is possibly carcinogenic to humans. caused increased incidences of lung and genitourinary cancer mortality
Naphthalene
<10000kg Excessive exposure to naphthalene may affect the blood, breastfed baby, eye, lung and the unborn child.
Organo-chlorine and organo-fluorine compounds
CFCs (as C) (1998-2001)
<100kg Damage the ozone layer so may affect health indirectly through increased uv radiation at ground level.
CFCs (total mass 2002 onwards)
<50kg
Carbon tetrachloride
<100kg Excessive exposure to carbon tetrachloride may affect the brain, digestive system, eye, kidney, liver and skin, and may cause cancer.
Dioxins and furans – as ITEQ 70 mg Excessive exposure to dioxins may affect the heart, immune system, liver, skin, thyroid gland and the unborn child, and may cause cancer.
Dioxins and furans- as WHO TEQ 40 mg
Halons (as C) (1998-2001) <100kg Chemicals containing fluorine and chlorine. Many cause cancer or have narcotic effects. They can be associated with dioxin formation.
Halons (total) (2002 onwards) <50kg
HCFCs (as C) (1998-2001) <100kg
HCFCs (total) (2002 onwards) <1000kg
HFCs (as C) (1998-2001) <100kg
HFCs (total) (2002 onwards) <100kg
PCBs as WHO TEQ .02g
PFCs (as C) (1998-2001) <100kg
<100kg
Phosgene (Carbonic dichloride)
<100kg Excessive exposure to phosgene may affect eye, lung, skin and throat.
Methyl chloride
<10000kg Excessive exposure to chloromethane may affect the brain, eye, heart, kidney, liver, reproductive system and skin, and may cause cancer.
Sulphur hexafluoride <100kg Excessive exposure to sulphur hexafluoride may affect the brain.
Source: The Air That We Breathe.

KIRKLEES INFANT MORTALITY

2010-01-26T14:24:00.000-08:00

Please note the general windrose pollution distribution similarities to the Beddington one outlined earlier in the blog.We certainly don't want some researcher being able to draw similar pictures in Croydon and Sutton wards within a year of an incinerator opening!

Chernobyl and Hiroshima: fiddled figures and false reassurances

2010-01-25T03:38:00.000-08:00

Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (Paperback)
by Alexey V. Yablokov (Editor), Vassily B. Nesterenko (Editor), Alexey V. Nesterenko (Editor), Janette D. ShermanNevinger (Editor) Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences Feb 2010

The latest publication from Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian scientists blows the Chernobyl cover-up wide open. The recent spat about nuclear safety in the Guardian still pulls a lot of punches. The public have been deliberately and extensively lied too since 1945 by the highest, and apparently most trustworthy national and international bodies. Its time to put a stop to this, a stop to negligent nuclear thinking and a stop to burning radioactive waste.

So…can you only say radiation caused illness when you can link a specific dose to disease…WHAT A CON !

1.Nobody was measuring the radiation levels in the early days.

2.The radionucleotides with the shortest half lives are the ones that decay quickest with the most intense alpha beta and gamma emissions….so the earliest days have the biggest exposures.

3.1000 times more intense than levels measured a few weeks or a month later.

4.No attempt made to count variations in levels,hotspots and geographically variable weather related deposition.

5.No attempt to measure the different rarer and often more dangerous elements and isoptopes to give a complete description to exposure (the commonly measured ones of caesium, strontium, iodine and plutonium are only a few of all the ones involved).

6.No possibility of measuring internal radiation doses from breathing in or swallowing radioactive contamination

So…can you only say radiation caused illness when you can link total radiation exposure to a whole population….ANOTHER CON!

The Americans forbade research and removed figures for the first four years ( at least) after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hiding approximately 100,000 deaths. They should have been added to the admitted figures, and would have affected all safety and risk criteria that have been used since.

The USSR forbade doctors to link illnesses to radiation for three years after Chernobyl. This data has been irretrievably lost. A triumph of expediency over scientific measurement.

It’s really time that CND, GreenPeace, Friends of the Earth and The Green Party got out of their intimidated bunkers and gained the confidence to challenge government on FIRST PRINCIPLES. The public have a right and a need to know.

"SMOKE IS REALLY BAD FOR CHILDREN"

2010-01-25T00:19:00.000-08:00

Here is yet another study, in a long line, that confirms extensive international research.We must not allow another,extra group of diesel lorries to go onto our roads,nor permit incinerators that belch the equivalent of 2 miles worth of 4 lane motorway fumes 24/7!What is even worse is that there are extra dangers. An international conference on air pollution, held in London a month ago, confirmed that waste transfer stations’ dusts (e.g. Beddington , Factory Lane and Bexley) have worse properties than traffic dust.

Traffic fumes increase the risks of child pneumonia
Top consultant announces breakthrough study
Denis Campbell, health correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 24 January 2010

Children who live near a main road are in greater danger of catching pneumonia because pollution from passing traffic damages their lungs. A leading expert in childhood breathing difficulties has made the link between exposure to particles from vehicle exhausts and a child's susceptibility to the chest infection, which can be fatal.

Professor Jonathan Grigg, an honorary consultant at the Royal London Hospital and academic paediatrician at Queen Mary, University of London, made the breakthrough after studying the effect of airborne pollutants on human lung cells. Children whose home is within 100 metres of a main road could be as much as 65% more likely than others to develop pneumonia, he said.

Although the disease is usually associated with the elderly, it is a significant childhood illness. Every year about 20,000 children and young people under 18 end up in hospital after contracting the condition. It can also be fatal. Between 2004 and 2008, it killed between 60 and 77 patients aged under 20 annually, of whom between 38 and 52 were under the age of five, according to data from the Office of National Statistics.

Children under 12 months are the most likely to die. Of the 76 young people under 20 who died in 2008, 29 had not reached their first birthday – 20 boys and nine girls – and 23 others were between one and four.

Grigg took contaminated air particles collected as part of Leicester city council's air-quality monitoring system and recreated their impact in a laboratory. He then added bacteria that would cause pneumonia in a human and assessed how many were sticking to the surface of the cells and getting inside them. In normal lungs a few bacteria do that, but in the lung cells that had been artificially exposed to pollution three to four times more did so.

"These findings strongly suggest that particles pollution is a major factor in making children vulnerable to pneumonia. We've shown a very firm link between the two. The study raises strong suspicions that particles cause pneumonia in children," said Grigg. "This is significant because pneumonia causes many admissions of previously healthy children to hospital." Some children with the disease spend several weeks in intensive care.

Previous studies have blamed proximity to a main road for children having higher rates of asthma, wheezing, coughs, ear, nose and throat infections, and food allergies.

A study this month by the Boston-based Health Effects Institute claimed that toxic emissions from vehicles can speed up hardening of the arteries, as well as impairing lung function.

"Strong evidence" suggested that being exposed to traffic fumes can lead to variations in heart rate and other potentially fatal heart complaints, the study said.

Exposure to the burning of wood or coal, or to tobacco smoke, can also increase a child's chances of pneumonia. One study found that secondhand smoke was to blame for 28.7% of all children under five in Vietnam who were admitted to hospital with the condition.

Professor Steve Field, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: "We have known for some time that pollution causes chest problems, such as asthma, in both children and adults. This new research adds to the weight of evidence about the problems of air pollution, especially cars, buses and lorries."

Childhood pneumonia was important because it often led to admission to hospital, costing the NHS hundreds of pounds per bed per day.

The research underlined the need for Britain to move towards greener forms of transport in order to protect public health from traffic fumes, he suggested.

JOINT WASTE AUTHORITIES

2010-01-12T00:27:00.000-08:00

THE JOINT WASTE AUTHORITY

Residents of the local authority jungles are going to have to get used to a new creature. Partly a Frankenstein monster sewn together from bits of four councils, partly a legal genetic modification, it is set to prowl the local rubbish tips in search of savings and profit and opportunity.

TALK ABOUT PREPARING FOR PRIVATISATION !

It will be more difficult to spot, won’t have to say what its going to do, won’t have to say as much as a local council about what it has done and will be made as near immortal as current technology allows. Without clear democratic accountability, and camouflaged as an entirely new legal entity it will be trying to get away with emissions and residue murder….BEWARE…..

4,000 or 500,000: CHERNOBYL CASUALTIES

2010-01-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

The whole issue of nuclear safety,which has been fought over for 65 years, is rehearsed again in the Guardian article,by John Vidal,yesterday:

At the children's cancer hospital in Minsk, Belarus, and at the Vilne hospital for radiological protection in the east of Ukraine, specialist doctors are in no doubt they are seeing highly unusual rates of cancers, mutations and blood diseases linked to the Chernobyl nuclear accident 24 years ago.

But proving that infant mortality hundreds of miles from the stricken nuclear plant has increased 20-30% in 20 years, or that the many young people suffering from genetic disorders, internal organ deformities and thyroid cancers are the victims of the world's greatest release of radioactivity, is impossible.

The UN's World Health Organisation and the International Atomic Energy Agency claim that only 56 people have died as a direct result of the radiation released at Chernobyl and that about 4,000 will die from it eventually.

They also say that only a few children have died of cancers since the accident and, that most of the illnesses usually linked to Chernobyl are due to psychological distress, radiophobia or poverty and unhealthy living.

But other reputable scientists researching the most radiation-contaminated areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are not convinced. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, another UN agency, predicts 16,000 deaths from Chernobyl; an assessment by the Russian academy of sciences says there have been 60,000 deaths so far in Russia and an estimated 140,000 in Ukraine and Belarus.

Meanwhile, the Belarus national academy of sciences estimates 93,000 deaths so far and 270,000 cancers, and the Ukrainian national commission for radiation protection calculates 500,000 deaths so far.

The mismatches in figures arise because there have been no comprehensive, co-ordinated studies of the health consequences of the accident. This is in contrast to Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where official research showed that the main rise in most types of cancer and non-cancer diseases only became apparent years after the atomic bombs fell.

With Chernobyl there have been difficulties in gathering reliable data from areas left in administrative chaos after the accident. Hundreds of thousands of people were moved away from the affected areas, and the break-up of the Soviet Union led to records being lost.

Controversy rages over the agendas of the IAEA, which has promoted civil nuclear power over the past 30 years, and the WHO. The UN accepts only peer-reviewed scientific studies written in certain journals in English, a rule said to exclude dozens of other studies.

Four years ago, an IAEA spokesman said he was confident the WHO figures were correct. And Michael Repacholi, director of the UN Chernobyl forum until 2006, has claimed that even 4,000 eventual deaths could be too high. The main negative health impacts of Chernobyl were not caused by the radiation but by the fear of it, he claimed.

But today Linda Walker, of the UK Chernobyl Children's Project, which funds Belarus and Ukraine orphanages and holidays for affected children, called for a determined effort to learn about the effects of the disaster. "Parents are giving birth to babies with disabilities or genetic disorders … but, as far as we know, no research is being conducted

The reason this issue remains local and relevant is that there will be increasing pressure to burn radioactive waste. Such incinerators need licences, but they are given:
Here is a link to an example in Sidcup:

http://www.srcl.com/srcl-radioactive-waste.html

The Secretary of State also has powers to keep disposal secret (Radioactive Substances Act, 1993, sectn 25), even from local councils. Developers of an incinerator in Spondon recently said that the public didn’t need to know that radioactive waste was to be burned there.

From Hiroshima onwards, nuclear physicists have spoken of the dangers of internal radiation from particles eaten, drunk or breathed in. The current government models ignore these, but the Chernobyl figures are a timely reminder of the dangers.

Bang Goes The Theory

2009-11-23T09:41:00.000-08:00

It is really extraordinary that within months of preliminary opening "non-conforming waste" blew up the furnace at Lakeside.This is no banana republic,but if the system can let in propane gas cylinders (a very well known incinerator hazard) what else will it not let in.This is an appalling indictment of control standards in our newest incinerator licensed to burn radioactivity.

This from UKWIN:

On this occasion the problem occurred during the commissioning trials which started in June 2009. In August 2009 some non-conforming waste containing gas cylinders was delivered in defiance of the plant’s tight specification for its waste acceptance criteria. Only municipal solid waste from collection rounds and some office and retail commercial wastes is contracted to be delivered into the Lakeside plant.

Unfortunately, the gas cylinders not only got into the Lakeside waste bunker but were picked up by the grab and fed through to one of the two boiler feeds to the furnace and exploded, causing damage which has had to be repaired. In addition, the whole bunker of waste had to be sorted to ensure that any other non-conforming wastes were eliminated. The plant will therefore not be fully operational until 2010, two years late.

The 400,000 tonne-a-year capacity Lakeside Energy from Waste Ltd plant is a 50:50 joint venture between the largest privately-owned waste management companies, Grundon, which is based in the Colnbrook area and Viridor, a subsidiary of the major water company Pennon, which is based in the south west of England.

The original £160 million budget for the plant’s development will be exceeded by a considerable amount…

Despite the fact that the site is only a few metres outside the Greater London boundary, only a limited amount of waste is going from London into the Lakeside plant. Waste is contracted to come from Wiltshire 120km to the west, Dorset 80km to the south of the plant and more locally from Slough and Berkshire. Clearly there is a need to rationalise waste movements within England in order to minimise the adverse impacts of the excessive and potentially unnecessary transport of waste…

Nuclear waste,the IPC,No Copper-bottom Guarantee

2009-11-19T00:48:00.000-08:00

Nuclear waste moved off the agenda!

(courtesy of Environmental Research Web and Dr.David Lowry)

The government’s new draft National Policy Statement on nuclear power, indicating which issues the new Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC) should take on board, and which it can ignore, contains this remarkable statement:
“The Government is satisfied that effective arrangements will exist to manage and dispose of the waste that will be produced from new nuclear power stations. As a result the IPC need not consider this question.” The draft statement goes on to say that: “Geological disposal will be preceded by safe and secure interim storage.”
So it seems, the waste issue is all in hand and we needn’t bother too much about it, or any problems with the much more active spent fuel that the new reactors’ high-fuel “burn-up” approach will create. Despite the fact that the highly active spent fuel is to be kept on site at the plant for perhaps several decades, that is evidently not something IPC will have to consider in its assessment of whether the proposed plants can go ahead. Instead the IPC will just focus on any conventional local planning and environmental impact issues that may emerge in relation to the 10 new nuclear plants that the government has now backed.
Quite apart from the issue of on-site spent fuel storage, there are plenty of other issues to discuss. For example, the risk of flooding in the years ahead, as climate change begins to bite. Dungeness was dropped off the original 11 strong list, due to local eco-issues, including, we hear, concerns about flood risks. That leaves the following, all of them also coastal sites, although allegedly less at risk: Bradwell, Hartlepool, Heysham, Hinkley Point, Oldbury, Sellafield, Sizewell and Wylfa, all existing sites, plus newcomers Braystones, and Kirksanton, both in Cumbria.
Friends of the Earth (FoE) nevertheless remains concerned: “The IPC is an unelected, undemocratic body – the new Commissioners aren’t directly accountable to the people their decisions will affect. It’s going to be very difficult for local people to get their voices heard, especially with key documents being so technical and opportunities to attend inquiries so few. If people are unhappy with the process they’ll have to take the matter to court, which is extremely difficult and costly.”
Here is another urgent and contemporary reason that nuclear waste has to be considerd by the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC)as part of its evaluation of the merits or otherwise of applications to build new nuclear power plants.
• When marine archaeologists in 1956 discovered the hull of the Vasa warship, submerged in the mud of Stockholm harbour since it sunk minutes into its maiden voyage in 1628, little could they have thought that this remarkable raising of the King Gustavus Adolphus’s flagship five years later in 1961 could scupper attempts to bury nuclear waste over four decades later
• As the British nuclear industry gears up to build a new fleet of nuclear reactors, the pressure to demonstrate a solution to the long term management of nuclear waste, its plans to adopt the Swedish system of nuclear waste disposal looks as if it might have hit the rocks.
• And what is making waves is the discovery that copper, the metal key to sealing-in the highly radioactive waste placed into the planned repository from the biosphere, corrodes. A new paper by several scientists at the respected Swedish Academy of Sciences (supported by Russian and Canadian colleagues) reports findings on their examination of the integrity of copper artefacts raised from the harbour mud after 333 years of being submerged. To their surprise they found that, from observation and analysis, contrary to accepted received wisdom copper corrodes, even when not exposed to oxygen.
• The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB, SKB) is charged with the responsiblity for the safety of the final repository for spent nuclear fuel. And may now have to return to the drawing board if copper proves an inadequate shieled to sheath the radioactively hot nuclear waste.• SKB’s chosen method of final disposal dubbbed ‘KBS-3’, and they have carried out technical research at its research facilities in Oskarshamn, in south east Sweden: the Canister Laboratory has developed encapsulation techniques and the nearby Äspö Laboratory uses its subterranean caverns to test rock suitablity and back-fill media.
• The high level radioactive waste will have to be emplaced for 100,00 years, the period over which the radiotoxicity of the irradiated fuel decays to become comparable to the radiotoxicity of the natural uranium used to produce the fresh nuclear fuel.
• Doubts also cast over suitability of underground emplacement in ancient bedrock due to volcanic activity over the period its would have to remain stably stored.
• It may well mean the current interim store, CLAB, adjoining the Oskarshamn reactor site, may have to extend its storage ponds, build forty meters underground, looking just like a set from a Bond film, as the storage ponds glow with an eerily manacing deep blue.
• The painstaking preparation work done by several scientific teams- even counting the numbers of ants, rodents, bats, deer and giant elk living in the candiate disposal area, may all go to waste. For the Swedish nuclear industry, this is an acute crisis, as it, like the UK, wants to add new reactors to a fleet that already prides nearly half Sweden’s power. The full multi-volume environmental impact assessment is due to be published in December.
• On Monday 16 November a colloquium will be held in Stockholm, bringing together some of the world’s best corrosion experts to evaluate the Swedish discoveries. The future of not just the Swedish nuclear industry, but Britain’s too could hang on what this scientific meeting

Fallujah's birth defects..a crime against humanity?

2009-11-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

There is a serious issue about Falluja...it will be played out in the press...and possibly in the UN,if the Americans don't censor it as usual.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects

Of course its the depleted and undepleted Uranium...but it is ironic that,when wanting to squirm away from shells, a spokesman said it could be either radiation,chemicals or particulates!

The graph shows what happened to birth defects in Devon when an incinerator started up!

List of Incinerators of Radioactive Waste

Here is a list of incinerators that burn radioactive material. Note that this is data from 2002. Steelworks also reprocess radioactive material and produce radioactive emissions.

ADDENBROOKS HOSPITAL, CAMBRIDGE
BNFL CAPENHURST, CHESHIRE
BNFL BERKELEY, GLOUCESTERSHIRE
BRITISH ENERGY, HEYSHAM, LANCS
BRITISH ENERGY, HARTLEPOOL, CLEVELAND
BRISTOL UNIVERSITY, BRISTOL
CLINICAL WASTE INCINERATION, SHEFFIELD
CLINICAL WASTE, DENMARK HILL, LONDON
EUROCARE, WREXHAM
GLAXO, STEVENAGE
MAGNOX ELECTRIC WYLFA
MAGNOX ELECTRIC, DUNGENESS
MAGNOX ELECTRIC, OLDBURY
MAGNOX ELECTRIC, SIZEWELL
MEDICAL ENERGY, WORCESTER
MEDIPOWER SERICES, BRISTOL
NORTH WEST ENERGY, SALFORD
NOTTINGHAM NHS TRUST, NOTTINGHAM
S GRUNDON, SLOUGH
SHANKS CHEMICAL SERVICES, HYTHE
SHANKS CHEMICAL SERVICES, PONTYPOOL
SMITH KLINE BEECHAM, WELWYN
SOUTH MANCHESTER NHS TRUST, MANCHESTER
ST MARKS HOSPITAL, NORTHWICK PARK
VIRIDOR, PLYMOUTH
WHITE ROSE, ASHFORD
WHITE ROSE, BOLTON
WHITE ROSE, IPSWICH
WHITE ROSE, LEEDS
WHITE ROSE, NOTTINGHAM
WHITE ROSE, OLDHAM
WHITE ROSE, PONTEFRACT
WHITE ROSE, SIDCUP

Muck,Planning and Brass Neck

2009-10-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

How to fly a pyrolysis incinerator under the planning radar……
And then let the aliens breed a new colony!

From Where there’s Muck there’s Brass……GLA Oct 2009

"whereas smaller sites can be located amongst housing or
industrial units and use the heat generated locally. EPI have sited their
pyrolysis plant in a current waste treatment area, which underpinned
their business model and helped during the planning process.

EPI has a series of small modular pyrolysis units up and running
outside London. The Committee visited a test site on an industrial
estate in Mitcham. It has a single processor unit, which can process
8,000 tonnes of waste a year. Up to four other units could be added
on to the site to process 40,000 tonnes per year which is the average
waste requirement for a borough. This would produce enough
electricity to power an estimated 7,000-10,000 homes. This size of
plant would require around 3,000 sq ft of covered space and a smaller
version could be developed for use near to large buildings such as
sports centres and hospitals, which can use both the heat and power
produced. The long-term plan at Mitcham is to sell heat to other
units (such as a 24 hour bakery) on the estate.
The benefits of this process are that as the waste is not burnt, more
energy is captured than through the incineration process, there are no
harmful emissions, the process is odourless and virtually noiseless. In
addition, the size of the operation meant that recent planning
applications for 40,000 tonne plants had been approved in 12 weeks.
The plants are not subject to Environment Agency regulation as they
are considered low impact and therefore local authority environmental
health departments are responsible for granting the facilities a permit.

No Harmful Emissions!? That will be a first…I would definitely like to see the peer reviewed research on which such a statement is based.

The Residues?....pyrolysis (which is an unalterable chemical process,like gravity is for physics )produces some of the most carcinogenic residues known to man.

JAPANESE CANCERS,FALLOUT,NUCLEAR POWERSTATIONS AND INCINERATION

2009-10-25T01:53:00.000-07:00

Where did the Mushroom Clouds go?....What happened next?

The latest decision by government to allow low and very low level waste to go into landfill blows a chill wind over the whole incinerator issue.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/19/nuclear-waste-landfill-threat?&CMP=EMCENVEML326

There isn’t much (probably 50 yards) between that and burning the stuff. There are at least three London incinerators already licensed to do that, with appropriately high infant mortalities downwind…Beddington could join the club!

The microscope picture above (from Treatment and Conditioning of Radioactive Incinerator Ashes) shows how the radioactive metals go up the chimney and condense in the cold air outside. Because of the tonnages involved even filtering will fail to prevent significant amounts of radioactive metallic “snow”.

Although the American occupying authorities removed all the morbidity and mortality data for the five years after the bombs, and prevented Japanese research, the graph shows the catastrophic growth in cancers as a cause of mortality in subsequent years.

http://jjco.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/32/suppl_1/S22?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=dioxins+incinerators&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

The cancer rate was 75/100,000 in 1947 and was 250 in 2004.

An onsite nuclear physicist said he thought that the refusal to count the immediate deaths from fall out dusts dramatically reduced the numbers, but hid the truth.

HOLDING COMPLEXITY IN MIND

2009-09-22T06:11:00.001-07:00

Download,print,scribble,connect....but enjoy would be too strong

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE..A GLOBALISED VIEW

2009-09-22T01:10:00.000-07:00

"Much of it lands in West Africa. An investigation by the Mail on Sunday found computers which once belonged to the NHS being broken up and burnt by children on Ghanaian rubbish dumps. They were trying to extract copper and aluminium by burning off the plastics, with the result that they were inhaling lead, cadmium, dioxins, furans and brominated flame retardants. Tests in another of the world's great fly-tips, Guiyu in China, show that 80% of the children of that city have dangerous levels of lead in their blood."

From George Monbiot's article in the Guardian today.

So the EU's WEEE directive is working then!

Soon all these good things will be on our doorstep too,its only fair to share.

LONDON AIR POLLUTION DISASTER

2009-09-20T14:58:00.000-07:00

LONDON AIR POLLUTION DISASTER

Simon Burkitt and CCAL have forced the government to release the truth about their sums for deaths from air pollution in LONDON under FOI.It does not make for pretty reading:

*** Government releases previously unpublished spreadsheets for calculating premature deaths due to air pollution in London after formal information request from ‘Clean Air in London’ (CCAL) ***

*** Using government spreadsheets and its current risk figures indicates there were around 5,000 premature deaths in London in 2005 due to dangerous airborne particles (PM10) alone ***

*** CCAL urges Mayor Johnson to apply the Precautionary Principle when developing his Air Quality Strategy and accept government recommendations for sensitivity analyses which suggest there may have been some 6,300 to 7,900 premature deaths in London in 2005 due to PM10 alone ***

“Ministers tend to say:
air quality is good across 99% of the UK’s landmass;
has improved a lot since 1990;
that people lose on average a maximum of seven to eight months of their lives due to the problem;
and the alert bands show air pollution as being mostly ‘low’ or ‘moderate’.

The real picture is quite different.

1.No-one lives in our fields and mountains; they live alongside the 1,117 kilometres of roads in London (2,496 kilometres nationally) forecast by the government to breach legal standards for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in 2010.

2. Air quality has improved since 1990 but the level of dangerous airborne particles (PM10) in London has increased at a mean rate of around 0.4% per year since the late 1990’s despite public health laws requiring sharp reductions.

3. London has the highest annual mean concentrations of NO2 of any capital city in western (or eastern) Europe.

4. Rather than talk abstractly about an average reduction in life expectancy across 60,975,000 people, Ministers should warn people that the amount of time lost per statistical victim due to dangerous airborne particles may be 9.8 years.

5. Air quality can be in the 'low' band all year round but still breach European Union (EU) limit values.”

So,into this very real mess,the local councils intend to force through new sources of particulate pollution,from new waste streams.The continuing denial about how bad London's air is already,how many people its killing,how many childrens' lungs are being damaged and how many pregnancies ruined JUST WILL NOT DO!

"SAFE" LEAD LEVELS HARM CHILDREN

2009-09-17T08:59:00.000-07:00

Young children's exposure to lead in the environment is harming their intellectual and emotional development, according to UK researchers.

The researchers say the toxic effects of lead on the central nervous system are obvious even below the current so-called safe level of lead in the blood.

They are recommending the threshold should be halved.

Lead has been removed from paint and petrol by law in the UK, but it is still widespread in the environment.

Sources of Lead:

Lead-based paint
Household dust
Lead water pipes
Soil around the home
Paint on children's toys
Children's bead necklaces
Christmas lights
Lead smelters/industries/incinerators

The Bristol researchers took blood samples from 582 children at the age of 30 months.

They found 27% of the children had lead levels above five microgrammes per decilitre.

They followed the children's progress at regular intervals and then assessed their academic performance and behavioural patterns when they were seven to eight years old.

After taking account of factors likely to influence the results, they found that blood lead levels at 30 months showed significant associations with educational achievement, antisocial behaviour and hyperactivity scores five years later.

1.With lead levels up to five microgrammes per decilitre, there was no obvious effect.

2.But lead levels between five and 10 microgrammes per decilitre were associated with significantly poorer scores for reading ( 49% lower) and writing (51% lower).

3.A doubling in lead blood levels to 10 microgrammes per decilitre was associated with a drop of a third of a grade in their Scholastic Assessment Tests (SATs).

4.And above 10 microgrammes per decilitre children were almost three times as likely to display antisocial behaviour patterns and be hyperactive than the children with the lower levels of lead in their blood.

You may remember the Avonmouth smelter post below.....so Bristol are sensitive to this area of contamination.You may also remember how blase the English authorities are about measuring heavy metals,and think the problem is over for London. The map above,from Hull,shows the widespread extent of potential plumes.

Well, this research proves its not over....and that all those other heavy metals,mercury in particular,will make it all very much worse.As usual,the children are most vulnerable.....the researchers are beginning to reccommend that paediatricians start taking blood level tests of Lead again, and all that "hidden" contaminated land is just as important as ever.

CORONER'S JURY SAYS URANIUM GUILTY

2009-09-14T14:38:00.000-07:00

A coroner’s jury, last week, found that a soldier from IRAQ1 contracted cancer from depleted uranium in theatre. To do this they decided that the model of radiation damage proposed by the MOD was wrong, and that a model of internal radiation damage proposed by Professor Busby was to be preferred. Together with the Corby limb deformity decision of a month ago, the case adds to set a series of legal precedents about the effects of inhaling uranium, heavy metals and dioxins. This makes any refusal to measure heavy metals and dioxins near hazardous waste incinerators irresponsible and failing to set up public health monitoring around them grossly negligent. The HPA case for no research is now untenable, in my opinion. No doubt there will be appeals, but please bear in mind the opinions of the judge over Corby and a jury over cancer. It is not eccentric or foolish to believe that incinerators can be hazardous, either through their chimney emissions or their waste residues. The burden of proof and guarantee of safety now definitely resides with the commissioning council and the developer, and they can’t prove anything without measurement.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS

2009-09-11T02:21:00.000-07:00

THE SLWP CON 2

THE MASTER PR CONJURERS FROM LONDON

What do their flower filled booklets and clean presentations want to draw your eyes away from?

1.New, dangerous waste streams.

2.100,000+ tons of concentrated deadly residues a year when fully active.
3.Contaminated proposed sites with damaging development dusts.

4.Chimney emissions of nanoparticles:

a) Immediately,like vehicles, cause and worsen asthma in children and heart and lung problems in adults.

b) the heavy metals, dioxins and any radioactivity affect pregnancy outcomes.

c) Over the lifespan of the contracts many more serius diseases will occur.

What can you do about this? Join the Greens, FOE, Greenpeace, UKWIN….write to your MP….put it on your neighbourhood group agenda…write to the newspapers. New planning regulations have come in recently that mean your voice will count for very little, very soon. This totally fraudulent consultation process shows just how easy it is to park an incinerator on your doorstep…and say that that’s what you chose.

A Tragi-Comedy in Several Parts

2009-08-24T06:46:00.000-07:00

Scaremongering A La Mode….or “plus ca change”……

Characters: the usual suspects, Production : Croydon Advertiser, Feb and March 1995 (Public kept in dark over contaminated gasworks…and Gasworks row flares up…), Values: plenty on resale

Enter stage left:

Foe Croydon (Paul de Zylva):
“There is a toxic legacy from the days of town gas production, with all sorts of chemicals seeping into the subsoil. British Gas has a huge public liability to clear its sites up." ( Independent consultants had identified arsenic, mercury, chromium, nickel and cadmium…but no mention was made of the complex hydrocarbons and dioxins guaranteed to be there as well).

British Gas:
“We have nothing to hide over work on sites which might be contaminated. We only sell them to reputable buyers. The reason why detailed studies of pollution are not made available for public inspection is because soil analysis procedures are extremely complex for the non-specialist. General publication can lead to a misleading perception of the actual risk, and result in pressure to carry out remedial works which may not resolve the real problem." (!)

Foe Tandridge (Barbara Child):
"Local residents have a right to be kept informed of any potential contamination in their area, and should not be kept in the dark on a need to know basis." ( Godstone Road, Whyteleaf)

Sir Paul Beresford ( Central Croydon MP and junior environment minister):
“The friends of the earth campaign has been alarmist and irresponsible. It’s not fair on people living nearby and makes me really cross. Perhaps they are having a go at me because I am an environment minister. I insist that there are adequate safeguards to make sure that once-polluted sites pose no danger. The information is complex. If you go to a doctor he might give you a prescription, but he doesn’t explain the complicated details of the drug." (really? some doctor!)

The curtain falls...

Some years later…..time having passed by…..the greater understanding of particulates.....dioxins..... The Corby Judgement…..the 2007 graph of early neonatal deaths is published by Croydon PCT (see below)…..new developments around Factory Lane…new residues from new incinerators to deal with.

Part the Second:

“Parallel Processes”
….procurement and public consultation (they never meet)

the audience feels its going backwards to the future !?

LORRIES AND CHIMNEYS

2009-08-05T10:32:00.000-07:00

LORRIES,CHIMNEYS and A DUTY OF CARE

There is no doubt that air pollution from cars and lorries contributes to the causes of birth defects and low birth weight, in a general way. Last week the Corby judgement proved that special lorries carrying special cargo did the same, in a very spectacular way.

Birth defect, low birth weight and infant mortality increases around incinerators have almost always been attributed to the chimney emissions, and only one study looked at vehicular traffic and incinerator emissions together. It found that as road traffic increased, so did birth defect rates, in proportion. Birth defects near those incinerators were also raised,the nearer the more.

Croydon’s own figures on congenital malformations are ( for whatever reason) not being made publicly available, though they are collected and sent to the Office of National Statistics. A graph of early neonatal mortality (within 7 days of birth) is the nearest we can get to this important area.

As you can see above, Croydons own impressive improvement is suddenly halted by a peak in the early eighties,and a number of other peaks follow.The 1994-2002 looks very serious, and is almost coterminous with the period that Croydon often featured at the top of Londons PCT figures for birth defects, shown in Dr Ryans research .This is not commented on or explained in the document (Croydon Child Health 2007).

As Croydon Council seeks to embark on commissioning a variety of incinerators don’t you think that a special study of Croydons traffic pollution (particulates especially),the power station emissions, the Factory Lane dusts,Beddington lane dusts, land reclamation dusts and incinerator dusts is absolutely essential.One senior Italian researcher expressed the opinion that he thought it totally irresponsible to commission new waste facilities without including public health monitoring as mandatory.You will look in vain for this in the first and second SLWP consultation documents.

In view of the serious expense of litigation, isn`t it imperative that Croydon Council does not lay itself open to accusations of gross negligence, as did Corby,whatever the SLWP decides?The population of Corby is about 53,000….the area affected by the incinerator plumes and road movements could contain nearer 500,000.

In this split between each of the four boroughs,the SLWP and the final contractors,where will the legal and financial responsibility for compenstaion rest?

CORBY:Council and Health Authority Denials

2009-07-29T03:38:00.000-07:00

CORBY: TEN YEAR HEALTH AUTHORITY and COUNCIL DENIAL

Despite the very well known dangers of heavy metals and dioxin dusts Corby Council has spent millions of council-tax payers money on defending the indefensible.It would not surprise me if other groups started actions,in other parts of the country,and on many other health issues.
Now, the Health Protection Agency is insisting to local authorities that incinerators are safe, having done no research on birth defects and infant mortality around London’s incinerators, and refusing to publish the figures it has, until forced to do so under FOI. This is despite a growing body of international evidence that even traffic derived pollution has profound effects on pregnancy development and outcomes. Dr. Michael Ryan’s work on this topic shows very serious effects.
The neighbouring borough of Bexley funded an investigation of the dust around its Manor Road waste site, with disturbing findings. The monitoring of the current position around the hazardous waste transfer station in Factory Lane, Croydon, needs clarifying and future lorry movements related to the SLWP need to be examined very carefully. People need to realise that every 100,000 tons of burnt /pyrolysed waste produces 30-40,000 tons of very hazardous dioxin and heavy metal filled ash/char. The same cargo as went through Corby. Arguing about chimney emissions is one thing, ignoring the VERY SERIOUS RESIDUE issues is another.

Radioactive Waste Incineration

2009-07-23T03:42:00.000-07:00

The problem is that radiation risk science is in a class of its own because the nuclear industry is fundamentally a state enterprise. It's been partly privatised but the world powers made it inalienably a matter of national policy from 1942 onwards. Just think of the asbestos analogy. If firms were putting asbestos-contaminated material into incinerators on the reasoning that dilution and dispersion were acceptable risk reduction techniques they'd be shut down immediately. But asbestos never, in anyone's mind, stood between the west and the red menace. The radiation risk model chosen by the government deliberately avoids a real study of the effects of any internal radioactive dose, particularly from the family of alpha-particle emitters (remember the Russian journalist).There is a pretence that the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only affected by the Gamma radiation of the explosion(the Saharan sun) and not by eating ,drinking and breathing in the radioactive dusts (the Saharan sand).To help matters along the relevant data for the first 5 years (1945-1950) were removed and Japanese research halted. Japan was, after all, under American military occupation. Many scientists lost their careers in the arguments over these issues, and Professor Rotblatt, a member of the Manhattan project, who won a Nobel peace prize for his work to stop atmospheric testing, saw the two issues of data withholding and alpha emitter exclusion as fatal flaws in our current safety standards.
So the present and future of emissions policy is inextricably bound up with governments' avoidance of liability for past errors and they'll continue with their denials until they are put into court, the science tested in a forum which absolutely requires balance, and the decision won.
Such a tactic would involve a legal challenge to the authorization of a particular incinerator to burn radioactively contaminated material, a crucial consideration would be that the incineration involved elements of high atomic number.
These issues may appear irrelevant to people not into what the government loves to call “low-level radioactivity”. Interested readers should log into the LLRC website and follow their noses…..an inventor of the atom bomb, inspector of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, witness to the Pacific UK, Australian ,NZ and USA servicemen’s exposures and active teacher and campaigner was there before them, but only the very restricted audience at London hospitals were privileged to hear.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING COMMISSION

2009-07-15T08:31:00.000-07:00

In the biggest shake-up of the planning system for more than 60 years, energy companies and developers are fine-tuning proposals that will test the government's resolve to fast-track schemes considered vital for the national interest.
This week, Gordon Brown maintained that the new regime would "speed up decisions ... for the national infrastructure" in advance of a statement today from energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband, pushing the case for more wind farms.
While much of the present planning system will remain in place, the new regime will remove decisions on big, strategic infrastructure projects - airport runways, major road schemes and new rail lines, as well as power stations, wind farms, waste disposal schemes and new water projects

Decisions will be taken from local councils and handed to the non-elected IPC.Its head, (ex-chief exec Kent County Council) Pitt replies: "My best estimate is that we will be dealing with a significant number of applications by late spring [2010], and that a substantial amount of groundwork will have been done by both the applicants and other organisations."

See John Vidal's article in the Guardian,WED 15th JULY

BIOCHAR

2009-07-09T10:14:00.000-07:00

BIOCHAR pyrolysate, new gold?..........or same old, same old….

I went to the LAEC energy from waste committee today, where there was a real buzz in the air, and a hard sell for a new unheard of waste treatment method that had even been cleared by Ireland for dealing with BSE cattle!...errrrr?

Some members of the committee even thought it would be better than the old coal via coke to gas system (the “old” pyrolysis) because it was “ new technology”. So where had all the heavy metals in the sewage disappeared to I asked myself….it seemed too much of a free lunch to me…so I asked around.

“If you were pyrolysing waste materials, then I think you are right in assuming you will get a waste product at the end of the process. This could be contaminated with dioxins, PCBS, PAHs, etc. The Env. Agency would regulate as a waste, so you would need to demonstrate safety before you could apply to agricultural soils (or elsewhere I guess).”

From a leading expert in Biochar research

“4) What other impacts need to be considered?Pyrolysis can result in air pollution and particulate emissions known to have serious impacts on human health. As with conventional incineration, toxins contained within feedstocks are emitted into the air or retained in ash or and charcoal Some biochar companies are already using a wide variety of “wastes” which can include treated wood, crop residues that have been sprayed with agrichemicals, plastics, used tyres or coal mixed with other biomass. The impact of adding large quantities of potentially toxin-laden charcoal into soils must be assessed, along with air emissions from pyrolysis.”

From carbontradewatch.org

So if some bright spark suggests a new miracle cure for dried sewage sludge, or rubber tyres, I’d take it with a pinch of salt, if I were you.

RADIOACTIVE and HAZARDOUS

2009-07-09T07:43:00.000-07:00

RADIOACTIVITY AND HAZARDOUS WASTE….. “ paint-pots and plutonium rods”… it ain’t.

The new economics of landfill tax for commercial and industrial waste, twice the volume of municipal, mean its too expensive to go to landfill,and so its coming to an incinerator near you.Now local areas will deal with local waste streams,whatever they are (central government presumption).

Rubber tyres, tarmac, contaminated earth from Victorian sites, asbestos demolition waste, car oils, industrial lubricants, waste, such as contaminated wood, glass and plastic . Electronic waste, such as fluorescent tubes, computer monitors and televisions, batteries (full of toxic heavy metals).Industrial waste, such as solvent, paint, varnish, oils, cleaning cloths, filters and soiled protective clothing .Residue from other waste treatments, such as ash from incinerators.
Agricultural pesticides and BSE contaminated cattle
In the UK, almost all radioactive waste comes from the nuclear power industry.
2% comes from defence uses (nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered submarines).
1% comes from medical and industrial uses of radioactive substances.

This is an example of the regulation

Special Form Certificate

Special form material means either:

- An indispersible solid radioactive material;
- A sealed capsule containing radioactive material that shall be so manufactured that it can be opened only by
destroying the capsule.

This means that if you have radioactive material which has a current Special Form certificate the packaging requirements
for transport are less onerous, often enabling a less expensive and more readily available transport package to be used.

If the material is no longer Special Form it may mean that “Type B” container is required which can in turn lead to a more complicated operation.

What is Best Practicable Means?

The Environment Agency requires users
of radioactive materials to demonstrate pro-actively that they are using the
Best Practicable Means to minimise the accumulation of radioactive waste and
to minimise the discharge of that waste to the environment, before users are
granted authorisations to accumulate and dispose of radioactive waste. There
is no definitive definition of BPM as each user's situation will be different.

What do we mean by 'Waste'?

Radioactive material has a wide range of
applications such as in Medicine to diagnose and treat patients, in Universities
and Research Companies for research and in Industry for supporting operational
processes.
Where waste radioactive material is secured within robust physical
containment, it's classed as a 'waste closed source'; if not, it is more generally
called 'radioactive waste'. The regulations governing the disposal of these
broad classes of material are different.

What do we mean by 'Closed Sources'?

Radioactive closed sources have
a wide range of applications such as in Medicine to diagnose and treat patients
and in Industry where they are found in instruments and gauges that determine
levels, volumes and thickness.
Where waste radioactive material is secured within
robust physical containment, it's classed as a 'waste closed source'; if not,
it is more generally called 'radioactive waste'. The regulations governing
the disposal of these broad classes of material are different.

===========================================

There is a real issue about “lost” closed sources, enough to give rise to European concern and regulation! Which is a comfort.

THE CONTRACT

2009-07-03T04:37:00.000-07:00

THE COMMON PROCUREMENT VOCABULARY……otherwise a series of nearly impenetrable codes for helping trans-european bidding:or sweeping the dust under the carpet!

Not just any incinerator,but a hazardous waste incinerator!

This is what Croydon is asking bids for:

1.9051330= Incineration
2.9051390=Sludge disposal
3.90520000=Radioactive, toxic, medical and hazardous waste services ( you can guess why they wanted that in code)
4.90524200=Clinical waste disposal
5.45252300=Refuse incinerator construction

I am not going on as that will do, don’t you think? We happy band under the plumes…..or are they going to compost the radioactive waste then? Democracy, this is not (when were your opinions asked on this), Communication, this is not. A cowardly skulking behind administrative iron curtains, a refusal to open a public debate and a Stalinist coup of the waste-mongers it is. Will the people of Sutton and Croydon stand for this? By an unusual coincidence the inhabitants of Kingston will be very far away, so won’t care.

BILLION LEAD PROCURER

2009-07-03T02:30:00.000-07:00

£919,000,000......hot off the press...Croydon lead procurer for SLWP contract.....more later!

DEADLY DEVELOPMENT DUSTS

2009-07-02T04:26:00.000-07:00

Victorian Values, urbanisation and the state we’re in now…. Why DEFRA’S “no conclusive evidence” is a fraud.

Our great-great grandfathers were poisoned by their work with coal and metals and chemistry, but the poison also soaked into the land. Like radioactivity the biological life of the poisons is many, many generations long. The industrial plants have, sooner or later, been demolished and the houses near them first housed the workers, then, very often the poorest in the community. The vacant plots were cheap and councils built their housing on them. As densification became more important even the most toxic sites began to be used after “remediation”, never mind the dusts raised by that, or the builders that followed, to dig deep foundations.

Incinerators have also been built in these areas, and scientific studies (notably that of Paul Elliott on cancers near incinerators, 1996) show lots of extra ill-health, from the rare liver cancers and sarcomas associated with dioxins, to leukaemias and congenital malformations and infant deaths. The standard comment is that these findings cannot be ascribed to whatever industrial activity is being investigated because of “confounding factors”…..i.e. the extra ill-health caused by being deprived, having a poor diet, being working-class, smoking, drinking, getting poor antenatal care etc.,etc. That’s why there is “no conclusive evidence”. Its not that there aren’t tons of illnesses.

There is this built-in 20th century factor which the Seveso explosion and following cancer studies show:

The first study was done on the years 1976-1986 (actually 10 years too early, as in the Elliott study), and found that the incidence of all cancers was the same for the exposed population as for the unexposed. This is despite extensive proof that dioxins cause cancer in laboratory animals. It was subsequently revealed that other dioxins were discovered in the contaminated soil that had come from another, unidentified, source. Thus background levels of pollution were already high enough to cause illness.

This is one of the problems facing epidemiologists, that it is virtually impossible to find a control group that has not been exposed to environmental pollutants. This technical scientific difficulty is being exploited and abused to give false reassurances. Our children will pay for this first, and then we ourselves will.

The potential Beddington incinerator will stand next door to the sites of 2 Victorian Gasworks (1826 onwards), Croydon power stations "A" and "B" and two metal foundries.Local historians will know,unlike me,their size,history and precise siting.Croydon already has peaks of early neonatal deaths.

As our Victorian legacy gets exhumed, and the effects of old and new incinerators are examined,bear in mind that the embryo and infant are the most "sensitive receptors".The statistics they provide will be the earliest and most important indicators that something is wrong.Will your local authority and the state show and share,or hide? Will Imperial College and SAHSU dare to research or not? Don't hold your breath!

An extraordinary example of planners "forgetting" contamination is at the Olympics site: 1 experimental nuclear reactor and its waste + 2 Thorium factories + 3 unregulated waste tip = 7,300 tons of radioactive waste now in a "safe" bunker on site...who's going to live there then?

CROYDON BIRTH DEFECTS

2009-06-29T01:55:00.000-07:00

Croydon at top of borough birth defect rates with Bexley……according to expert Michael Ryan……

Birth defect rates in Greater London 1995-2002
by Michael Ryan BSc, C Eng, MICE

Bexley,
the only London Borough with an incinerator authorised to burn radioactive waste [White Rose, Sidcup], and which is also subject to industrial PM2.5 emissions from three other sources, has had the highest rate of babies born with defects out of the 31 Greater London Primary Care Trusts[PCTs], for each of the five years 1998-2002.
The rates of babies recorded as born with defects in Bexley during 2002 was between 15 and 59
times greater than in Islington.

Grundon’s incinerator at Colnbrook is authorised to burn radioactive waste, hence there are elevated rates of babies born with birth defects in PCTs downwind. [ Slough, Hillingdon]

Birth defects are known to be caused by radioactivity, organophosphate herbicide/pesticides, and industrial PM2.5 emissions of dioxins, some heavy metals, and PAHs. Incinerator emissions can contain all these, hence the higher birth defect rates associated with radioactive waste-burning.

Greenwich
Work on the Millennium Dome site - clearing the polluted earth -gave rise to a massive increase in school asthma rates in Greenwich [from
11.9% in 1996 to 50% after works started] .There was a parallel rise in birth defects in the area in the 2years that followed.

Croydon
Has anyone suggested that Croydon’s high rate of birth defects should be investigated. If it is already high, could that be due to the Beddington site dusts, even before an incinerator?or Croydon’s own Victorian legacy? Perhaps we should ask Michael Ryan? Have the factory fires at 20th Century,later Centronics (industrial holders of radioactive materials) affected New Addington's infant mortality? I just think we need some research that is public.

SAHSU

2009-06-29T01:18:00.000-07:00

PROFESSORS PAUL ELLIOTT AND FRANK KELLY……
and the
MRC-HPA centre for environment and health.

Though these men are not in the public eye,they should be,for on their shoulders rests a heavy responsibility.They control the choice of projects researched, the vital postcode/illness databases (SAHSU) and the extent of freedom from government interference.Professor Elliott’s work stands at a crossroads of incinerator safety and air pollution effects and Professor Kelly’s ERG air quality research will monitor the complex mix of air pollutants over London.I doubt that they see their role as answering questions from the public,though they are publicly funded.Perhaps that may change?

Professor Paul Elliott from Imperial College London, the Director of the new MRC-HPA Centre for Environment and Health, said: "Your body has to deal with hundreds of different pollutants every day, the vast majority of which are probably harmless. However, we know that some pollutants can cause health problems – for example, some of the minute particles found in diesel fumes can make people’s asthma symptoms worse. " "It's quite difficult to work out whether certain pollutants are affecting our health because we are exposed to so many, over such long periods of time. Our new Centre is developing methods to look at the exposure of many thousands of people. Through this research we will investigate the extent, for example, a particular chemical is contributing to a particular health problem."

Professor Frank Kelly from King's College London, the Deputy Director of the new Centre, said "We are very much looking forward to working with colleagues at Imperial College to address a range of challenging environmental issues which contribute to the chronic disease burden in the 21st century".

BIOMASS BORIS

2009-06-28T02:49:00.000-07:00

Bio-mass Boris, the Joker in the pack…

Boris intends to build 98 waste plants and 577 combined heat and power plants as part of London’s low carbon economy (Ernst &Young prospectus, 2009) over the coming years. He has already taken many steps to wreck progress in air quality in London, the most important being the suspension of LEZ 3.

Last week the Institute of Environmental Health in London held an event:
“ A major expansion in biomass heat is underway to help the UK meet its CO2 reduction targets. The air quality impacts are, however, potentially a stumbling block, the successful management of these is key to a sustainable rollout of biomass heat. This event explores how the air quality impacts of biomass can be successfully managed, cover biomass technologies and their emission performance, before examining the regulatory framework and techniques for air quality assessment. Emerging renewable heat and air quality policy will be covered, and the issue of embedding air quality management in the planning process for biomass deployment Topics include: • Policy update (DECC) • Regulation of biomass plant (Environment Agency) • Developing sustainable wood fuel supply chains (Forestry Commission)”

The combination of traffic growth, waste management and combined heat and power are likely to have very detrimental further effects on London’s already poor air. There seems to be no integrated assessment of these changes, but rather a denial of their significance in marketing the capital to the world as a whole, let alone the health of the population.
As population growth is achieved by both densification and a move to the east...not only do current potential energy from waste developments give rise to issues about contaminated land...but also the Victorian "forgotten" industrial legacy gets to be "remembered",often as a surprise!

METALS and DIOXINS

2009-06-22T01:48:00.000-07:00

How London's Politicians aren't interested in Your Health.....despite rolling out incinerators (extract from strategy report)

Dioxins and furans

6.23 There are currently no standards or guidelines for dioxins or furans, and monitoring is
carried out at a single London site. These pollutants are however of significant public
concern.
6.24 Given the extremely high costs of monitoring for dioxins and furans it is not
recommended that further measurement sites be established. Whilst reporting of
concentrations on a more widespread basis could be undertaken, the manner in which
this is done needs to be given careful consideration, in the absence of standards for
comparison.

Lead and heavy metals

6.21 There is currently only limited monitoring for lead and heavy metals being undertaken
in London. However, existing national policies are expected to deliver the air quality
objectives for lead at practically all locations in the UK, with the exception of sites in
close proximity to major industrial emitters of lead. At a strategic level, there is no
requirement for monitoring of lead concentrations in London.
6.22 The current position with other heavy metals is less clear. There are currently no
standards or objectives for other metals, and whilst these are being considered for
cadmium, arsenic, nickel and mercury within the EU Fourth Daughter Directive,
current understanding is that it is unlikely that Limit Values will be set. At this stage,
it is recommended that monitoring of heavy metals is kept under review pending the
outcome of the Directive.

All the London roadside heavy metal measuring sites,Brent,Cromwell Road and Horseferry Road are a long way west of the incinerator plumes of Edmonton,Belvedere,Lewisham and potential Beddington, which cover the whole of East London,both sides of the river.I assume they were designed to measure car derived Lead pollution mostly.They are of no use at all in measuring London's incinerators' heavy metals emissions.Invisible..."simples".

CHIMNEY PLUMES and CADMIUM

2009-06-17T13:29:00.000-07:00

HEAVY METALS AND INCINERATORS........Early renal damage in a population environmentally
exposed to cadmium – The Avonmouth Study

1 Britannia Zinc Smelter in Avonmouth was the largest source of atmospheric cadmium emissions in the UK.
2 Closed in 2003 after over 70 years of operation
3 Large amounts of cadmium along with various other metals (inc. lead, arsenic, mercury) were emitted to air.
4 Cadmium is a nephrotoxin; the initial sign of cadmium induced renal damage is tubular proteinuria.
5 Increasing evidence that tubular damage may occur at low levels of environmental cadmium exposure.
6 Exposure may occur directly through inhalation of contaminated air and /or indirectly through ingestion of home-grown vegetables and house dust.
7 Soil sampling has shown a significant build-up of metal contamination in the soil up to 15 km from the smelter .

This is taken directly from the Imperial College SAHSU research poster.

Well,all sorts of rubbish goes into an incinerator,especially if we have to cope with electricals and hazardous waste streams locally.Mercury and cadmium are two of the commonest and most dangerous metals here.This tells you how you and your children will get them,how far they go(way outside the purple particle dispersion marker of the petition) and how small the damaging doses are.Unfortunately for Bristol,it wouldn't have been only cadmium and other heavy metals but also dioxins going up in smoke.There will be cancer clusters and other dioxin markers for sure...if not why not? Litigation and compensation avoidance.Is it the same reason that the Suffolk nuclear power station leaks were kept secret?To avoid scuppering another government programme.As usual we will never know.

BEDDINGTON LANE DUST

2009-06-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

BEDDINGTON LANE DUST….NOT JUST ANY DUST!.....Inflammation, Oxidative stress and Allergy (this is a bit long)

1.All waste transfer stations have a problem with dust…it was thought, until recently, that this was just “clean dirt” churned up by the lorries. Unfortunately research presented at the Cranfield University annual meeting in 2008
showed that this dust was much more highly reactive because of what was on it and would cause oxidative stress in the lungs when inhaled..... “ Thus, PM10 generated by the waste transfer facility at BX4 should be considered a potential health risk to
the neighbouring residential community.”

It criticised the assumptions of our very own SLWP plan:

ERM (2006) Sustainability Appraisal Report for the Surrey Waste Plan. Environmental Resource Management

Who said it was just ordinary dust!

2.Beddington monitoring station PM10 air went over its annual mean WHO safety limits (20) on 288 days of last year (2008)…..yes….288 ! Its annual mean PM10’s were 35…that is 15 over the WHO limit, leading to an excess respiratory mortality rate of either 9% or 32% (depending on who you want to believe).It is about 3,000 feet from the sewage farm entrance, so it is likely that the readings there will be higher, but to be fair, Beddington village itself is about as far the other way. I have no idea about the respective weight of traffic coming down, or going up Beddinton Lane, but it is certain to go up significantly were any incinerator to be built.
3.“The Sensitive Receptor and the Incinerator” new particulates could add to this already woeful story, and they have all sorts of extra stuff stuck to them. As, in the old legislation, the sensitive receptor was (still is?) classed as the 6 year old girl, surely it would make more sense to place a monitoring station nearer the school playgrounds. In fact it seems daft not to be monitoring the health of our school children a lot better as so many playgrounds are near ever busier roads.
4.Inflammation: think about a cut, or a burn, or a nettle sting, or a bee or a horse-fly sting. There’s pain (or itching), reddening, swelling and extra warmth to the touch. All of that is called the inflammatory response. Blood vessels expand, and blood flows faster, lots of little white cells squeeze between the walls of the capillaries and are ready to attack or eat up the enemy, before trying to heal things. You wouldn’t believe how many links in the chain there are and how everything “talks” to everything else. You can’t see into the tiny lung tubes and air sacs , nor is pain registered, just cough or wheeze, so skin will have to do. You can see that this is not over quickly, the lungs hold a “history” of what has happened to them. Just like you would yelp if hurt near the original wound. “Mad scientists” have gassed volunteers with Volvo engines in the basements of King’s College, and shown not only the inflammatory response, by sucking some of these cells up, but also the increased sensitivity to further insult persisting for some hours. The shoppers who had wheezing in the Oxford Street experiment showed altered lung sensitivity for up to 7 hours after. So,oxidative stress is expressed as inflammation, which can lead to scarring, which can lead to restricted lung growth.The morning rush hour Nox and Particulate peaks (which can be as high as 114 [PM10 norm 20!]) soften up the lung for the summer afternoon Ozone hit,on top of 24/7 Incinerator Effects.You couldn't make it up!
5.Allergy: some of us get hay fever a bit, or a little wheeze others get mild asthma, still other get serious asthma. American scientists believe that air pollution causes asthma as a condition, that it makes attacks happen once you have got it and that it is what lies behind the huge increase in children with it. In Britain, I don’t believe this is quite agreed.

INTER-AGENCY COLLUSION

2009-06-12T06:20:00.000-07:00

Toxic Burn, The Dioxin War and Smogtown….......

"catchy titles and a fun read"? ( all available from Amazon)

They are a depressing trinity, because the illnesses described make you feel quite sick, and the deliberately protracted legal cases, enquiries and government agency buckpassing take a real effort to follow. There is a common thread to them all, whether the East Liverpool WTI incinerator, The Agent Orange Vietnam veterans or the air pollution of Los Angeles.

It is one of collusion between powerful industries with their falsified science, government departments and agencies and so called independent inquiries. These are not some red-top, sensationalist or politicised rants , but carefully researched histories of often small peoples’ determined fight for environmental justice. The stories are really shocking because they expose how completely expendable we and our children all are to the globalised economic barons that rule our governments and the EU.
Have you ever heard of the Coalite Bolsover plant explosion? No ?I didn’t think so, it was our own version of Seveso, the Italian plant explosion that happened some 8 years later and brought our own accident to light. Did you know Al Gore broke his promises to Ohio to stop the building of the largest hazardous waste incinerator in the world? Did you know that Los Angeles had an air pollution problem since 1945 and the motor car was not identified as the cause for 30 years!?
You can pick your poison and have a good read.....it is now all firm American history.....you will never be the same again,I promise.

Well, when the plans and reassurances eventually come over the hill from the SLWP, DEFRA, The London Waste Board and the WasteMongers for the Not-Incinerator, remember the Greenwich Peninsula, Byker, Bolsover and Corby.

PARTICULATES

2009-06-10T23:21:00.000-07:00

Particles yet more damaging ……Hillary Benn at sea!

Tower Hamlets research shows that children’s lungs are more damaged than ever by London air.
5% below national average in size,
Nearly one on 10 reduced to a level internationally regarded as hazardous.

Lancaster Professor Maher said: "We're surrounded by this invisible mist of these millions of toxic particles - you can't see them but we know, we've measured them, they're here.
"When we do our leaf magnetic measurements, our research shows that down at small child height the concentrations - the number - of these very fine particles is sometimes twice the current EU regulation standard."
One set of measurements, outside the Cathedral School in Lancaster, revealed particulate levels that were above the EU standard.
The school's head, Anne Goddard, said the findings were "quite worrying".
"It's the only playground we have at the school and it's right next to the road. The levels are high so obviously the effect on the children, especially those with asthma, is a concern."

Lung damage is not the same as asthma…it is a permanent constriction and scarring that reduces a person’ resilience to illness in later life to a serious extent.

The idiotic comments of Hilary Benn,the minister responsible, should worry us all even more,

“ most of the landmass of Britain does meet the requirements.”,he said,

Pity 99% of the population don’t live in the 99% of the landmass that is particle free.Dooh!

What is this doing on an incinerator blog?Well the lungs don't care very much whether the tiny particles are coming from a car,lorry,nanotechnology or a chimney.What's stuck to the particles poisons you in different ways,sure,but its the total count of what's out there that matters.London's going for growth and the children will pay in the long run.

TOXIC LIBEL LAWS

2009-06-07T00:35:00.000-07:00

TOXIC LIBEL LAWS SILENCE SCIENCE JOURNALISM

The science journalist,Simon Singh, is campaigning to change English libel laws that are “Draconian and Expensive”.A damages judgement for a few thousand,will rack up lawyers’ fees of £500,000.You are guilty (of causing harm) and must prove your innocence(that the organisation has not been harmed!), a total reversal of what people believe to be their position before the law.Articles get withdrawn,or just not written and perhaps thoughts stop being thought. The problems in England are so serious (x 100 European expenses) that American states are beginning to pass laws the exempt US citizens from English libel laws in this area.A Californian journalist may write a critique of an English incinerator operator,say,and,if his article is read on the internet here he can be hauled up in, or threatended with court over here.People from the president of the Royal Society to Stephen Fry and Harry Hill are lobbying a current parliamentary inquiry…shouldn’t we be too?

SEWAGE MICROWAVE PYROLYSIS

2009-06-06T23:16:00.000-07:00

BEDDINGTON SEWAGE SLUDGES’S NEW DAWN: MICROWAVE PYROLYSIS.
From Kracow to Kualar-Lumpur waste scientists are studying how to deal with a new wave of sludge produced by urbanisaton and population growth.Historically it was sent out to sea or put into landfill,and more recently onto fields.Then they realised that fertilistaion was contamination,as heavy metal soil residues became ever more apparent and legislated against. So what to do?
Mix it with some carbon source (rubber tyres or tarmac will do just fine),as raw liquid sewage doesn’t heat very well,then cook it at low-for-incineration temperatures,take off the gas and bio-fuel and then……put the rest into landfill or tarpits.Sound familiar?Its Greenwich all over again,with the concentrated Xtra-Toxic goo and char to store and deal with.Just grate!

EUROPEAN DIRECTIVE SABOTAGE

2009-06-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

EURO ….F..Law……a TRANSPARENCY-LITE POLLUTER’S CHARTER

In the guise of cutting red tape and curbing administrative costs the Environment Committee of the EU Parliament has just last month passed amendments to European Directive [COM(2007) 843 final]that seriously affect our ability to monitor and inspect

Chimney emissions
Groundwater pollution
Soil pollution
Heavy metal emissions

The industry lobby wants to limit access to the legal complaint procedure by non governmental organisations promoting environmental protection, leaving an individual to face them alone!
The industry has gained permission for inspections every two years instead of every year.
Industry wanted derogations from limit values..it has got them!
Soil monitoring every 10 years, groundwater, every 5….!Heavy metals once a year
You won’t be informed until four months after a breach has occurred etc.etc.

When the SLWP come to say that incinerators are safe..who can argue with them….the operators will own all the numbers…..It is really time that we all had access to independent sources of monitoring,both particulates in general and heavy metals in particular.Perhaps it should be made a condition of the contract that we get heavy metal readings every week!

Isn't it truly amazing that in all this regulation there is no provision whatsoever for monitoring the health of the "local" population.That is absolutely disgraceful and negligent.Come on you Green MEP's!

EMISSION DISCREPANCIES

2009-05-31T06:47:00.000-07:00

Risky Business.....issue 2
“Little local difficulties” in the industry

A UK waste incinerator has operated under a management regime that falsified emissions monitoring data in breach of its environmental permit, a former employee at a site has alleged recently (see UKWIN link,news,Manchester). The operator rejects the claims but the Environment Agency has pledged to investigate.
One of his most serious allegations is that the plant’s continuous emissions monitoring system was regularly turned off during start-up and shutdown [a time in the in all incinerator cycles notorious for high dioxin emissions], and when the plant was operating abnormally. This means no accurate record of emissions would be made at these times and the flue gas treatment system was also not in use. The consequences of this would be that emissions of acid gases and organic pollutants such as dioxins would not be effectively abated - a breach of the site’s environmental permit.
When a French company bought an Italian incinerator recently it certainly didn’t get a bargain. It found that emissions data had been extensively and deliberately falsified, the police were involved and hard discs were seized.

NANOPARTICLES

2009-05-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

Nanoparticles…….New Incinerators, New waste streams, New Problems. The changing face of waste, more metals, more electricals and more plastics.

When you put metals into a furnace they are usually lumps, large or small and relatively safe, you can’t breathe a lump of lead in, for example. After you have heated them up, and made them go through chimney reactions they become very tiny particles and become very much more dangerous, mercury and cadmium being particularly serious examples. You will be surprised to hear that there are no laws regulating heavy metal discharge levels in air, apart from lead, so that councils can get away with not monitoring them. The levels of metals emitted by incinerators is very high, and much higher than found in emissions from cars. You may well hear of PM 10’s or even PM2.5’s….these particles are PM0.18’s! Filters designed for bigger particles won’t be able to cope…..even now cyclists masks do not protect them from traffic particulates. There is evidence from Mexico city that these can pass directly into the brain, via the nose, as well as being small enough to get into the blood via the lungs.

Another very real problem is the plastic packaging that everybody has got used to, as well as the plastics in bottles etc. PVC doors and windows are more than 90% organic chlorine, and will become more of the waste stream in future. The chlorine atoms in plastic are related to the formation of dioxins, directly. The more plastic in the burn the more dioxins are produced, to enter the merry-go-round of afterburning, flue gas washing and filter capture (or not!).

Many electrical goods contain PBDEs, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, and are finding their way into incinerator waste streams. They are also the flame retardants in furniture, now a legal requirement.

The face of incineration has changed in more ways than one. There are no easy reassurances, and no easy way to check what was on that lorry that just went in the depot. You can guess the number of wrongly declared lorry loads in the world history of incineration, but, by the time they got discovered, it was all too late.

CHIMNEY PLUME MAPS

2009-05-29T08:39:00.000-07:00

What's in a scale? That which we call a map, by any other scale would illustrate as clearly.....

A little food for thought on how easily DEFRA's air pollution report could be used to obfuscate rather than inform....
Once there were lies, damned lies and statistics. Now we live in the age of the image, in more senses than one, it could be updated to lies, damned lies and cleverly chosen images...Photoshopped images...

COST-BENEFIT and SCIENCE

2009-05-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

RISKY BUSINESS…the corrupted links between science, political economics, councils and big business… issue 1

Risk assessment has been turned into a sort of “abstract art” of cost benefit analysis and prediction of health and mortality. At its heart is an immoral equation : if you don’t know the names and addresses of the 4,400 people that died in London last year from air pollution, you aren’t guilty of anything. Epidemiology as an excuse for gross negligence. Profit before people.

The air pollution world is in a bit of a fix, at the moment, because the UK is going to be prosecuted for VERY BAD AIR INDEED…..London’s first and foremost. Pretty soon it will be possible for a private citizen to start a prosecution, all by themselves.

Here are some examples of how government has used science to muddy the waters:

Mortality is an important part of working out cost-benefits. In England this is done by COMEAP…it says that a 10 point rise causes a 6% increase in deaths.
That’s a bit odd, because the Americans, using the same figures say it could be as high as 17%.Other, modern, international figures come up with 19% or 20% increase. 6% or 20%....that makes a big difference to the cost benefit sums.
Pollution modelling a lot of it is done by computer now, not from real monitors in the street. DEFRA have chosen a programme (CMAQ, with the made-sorgam particle model) which European research has shown undercounts severe pollution by 50%.So you can pretend you have reduced pollution at a stroke.
Hiding the problem:In its recent guidance on air pollution to councils DEFRA has produced a document ,on page A3-27 of which, is advice on how to hide chimney emissions on computer models.. Grids of 50 metres square show dense concentrations of pollutants in certain areas. 200 metre grids make these disappear. Hide or show?...what do you think they will do?
The big LAEI…..these days the government doesn’t want to measure pollution in the real world…but in its fairyland world of computerised emission inventories, where the numbers are falling. It’s all a bit embarrassing really, because they haven’t shut the real world down yet. King’s college scientists show there has not been any fall in emissions for the last 10 years, what’s more, there may well have been a rise. Heatwave years are very bad, just like we are about to have.

The trouble is the government have a whip hand on the grants that keep scientists in work. Industry often decides what work it will fund or not. The Incinerator Industry has no intention of funding any real research, because it knows what will be found….just the same as in the rest of the world. The government want things covered up…it wants to talk about work done by ”independent “ scientists…when that is an opinion on original work done long ago, not an original piece of new work. There will be new incinerators, new waste streams and new problems.

Croydon Advertiser publicises the issue.

2009-05-28T04:44:00.000-07:00

Link to story online

PROTEST COSTS BIG-TIME

2009-05-27T14:45:00.000-07:00

Environmental Justice has a price..and the other side will use financial thuggery to bully you to silence:

The timing of protest is important in a financial context. Protest hardest and most often ,early,when it is still “free”.If you leave it till the formal planning stages it may already be too late,as it will be “expensive”.If you put an incinerator into a dense population, one of the reasons it is silly is that a large public opinion can be grown to come on your opposition side.Beware industry tactics that encourage late attention…well into the legal process.Here’s why:

From the Guardian 27/05/09

“In a recent campaign against the London borough of Hillingdon for failing to stop pollution from a coffee factory, locals were threatened with costs of £28,000 for simply applying to the court for permission to make a challenge.
"Whilst it is unlikely that our client would have been ordered to pay all, it did have a chilling effect and added to fund-raising pressures, which led them to withdraw," Gita Parihar, the solicitor at FoE who helped them with their legal aid application, says.
Paul Stookes, a lawyer who represents the Peacehaven residents, cites the recent case of Frank Morgan and Cathy Baker, neighbours who live close to a compost site in Publow, near Bristol. They complain of smells emanating from the site which are so bad Morgan claims to be stuck in his home "like a prisoner". They are also concerned about the dangers of bio-aerosols being released into the air.
Morgan and Baker were landed with a £25,000 legal bill after being granted an injunction to stop the site, which was later overturned. They were not backed by legal aid, but the claim was funded thorough legal expenses insurance contained in a household insurance policy.
The high court judge Mr Justice Sullivan highlighted the case in a report last year, Ensuring access to environmental justice in England and Wales, which found that only the "very rich or very poor" could afford to fight environmental schemes. In March, the court of appeal overturned the costs order and the case is now going to a full trial.
Stookes argues that these are the cases the government has committed itself to protecting by signing the Aarhus convention more than a decade ago. Under this the government promised to make sure ordinary members of the public who wish to pursue environmental challenges should have access to legal redress that were "fair, equitable and not prohibitively expensive".
FoE's Michaels argues there are "very particular problems with legal aid" and the bringing of environmental cases, not least that public funding is only available to individuals and not community groups or environmental non-governmental organisations who might be better placed to fund challenges.
"In some cases the group can put forward one of their members who might happen to be financially eligible, but that comes with a whole range of usual problems. Is there somebody in the group eligible for legal aid? The threshold for legal aid is pretty tight," says Michaels.
Even then the Legal Services Commission often asks for a contribution to cover the other side's legal costs. In the case of Peacehaven the legal action was taken in one person's name, and the contribution asked for and raised by the people of Peacehaven for the judicial review was £5,000. Although a sizeable sum, FoE says it is a low figure. The community dug deep to cover the amount, only to be forced to call it day when the stakes were raised even higher.”
The incinerator plans at Capel were defeated in the High Court after a long legal process.If people don’t know where that is…the plumes would threaten Dorking,Reigate and some of the most valuable properties and farms in the country.I don’t think that money was the sort of problem it would be in Thornton Heath ,for example.

BOWLS,INVERSION SMOGS and FLOODING

2009-05-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

THE WANDLE VALLEY, BOWL CITIES and RISING WATER LEVELS.

It’s quite difficult to realise the river Wandle is in a valley, when you are standing in Wandle Park, say. If you stand on the top of Banstead Road South on a clear day, you can see the ridge on which the Crystal Palace transmitter stands to the north. In between is a depression, really quite striking. It is part of the southern rim of the bowl inside which London has grown. The local part, in which a form of incinerator is likely to be built, to join the three others already on the eastern side (Edmonton, Belvedere and Lewisham). In the wrong weather conditions, an inversion layer can put a saucepan lid of warmer air over still, colder air. Like in the 1952 smog. This time what will be trapped will be invisible.

It is not a coincidence that the Megacities most troubled by air pollution are all forms of bowl cities: Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Beijing and London, already the most polluted in Europe, with the UK facing prosecution for breaking EU health based regulations. In the next ten years traffic is predicted to grow by 13%, jams by 60% and the population by 800,000. Things need to change drastically, and soon, to reduce the 4,400 annual death toll directly from air pollution. How many thousands of lorries will it take to deliver 200,000 tons of rubbish to Beddington, and the residues? When the roads are likely to be even more snarled up than before. Add to that the particulate pollution from the chimneys !

The level of the river Wandle is bound to rise. Much sooner than predicted before. Torrential rains will occasionally cause floods. Unfortunately for all of us the Victorians did not think to line their rubbish dumps, nor their industrial waste pits (though the US does not consider lining helps). When waters rise these sites will leak their poisons into the water table. The North-West planning group for climate change are seriously concerned about this in the Mersey basin, which has a lot. What about London’s Thames, and its tributaries?

THE LONDON WASTE BOARD

2009-05-26T06:35:00.000-07:00

TONS OF TECHNOLOGIES, THE LONDON WASTE BOARD and LEGAL LICENCES.

Apparently there are tons of technologies to choose from out there. Is that 200,000 or 400,000 or 600,000 or 800,000 tons of technology, sorry, rubbish, a year that the SLWP are going to contract for. Sites will be “modular”, who will decide when the next module will be added…..the councils’ need for extra capacity or the contractor’s need for more profit? A local councillor said at one of the consultation meetings that the borough ought to ask for a 110% capacity, so it could earn some money (also indicating that the site would be in his borough).Meaning that out borough sources of rubbish would generate “profit”. In Germany the large incinerators have contracts to burn Dutch rubbish from over the border……even importing 280,000 tons of Australian hexachlorobenzenes, so dangerous that the tankers had to be kept out of the shipping lanes.

Another little trick the incinerator companies and DEFRA like to play is to state various mortality rates, emissions and pollutants as 0.00x value per ton. This sounds small, until you multiply them by 200,000 (etc.).

The London Waste Board is keeping a very low profile at the moment, but did give evidence at the latest GLA Environment Committee meetings on air pollution. It is chaired by Boris Johnston, who has, single-handedly, reversed more clean air policies in his first year than anyone created. Two of its council representatives are involved with the SLWP, and a third has the Edmonton incinerator in his patch. Its representative at the GLA was keen to make explicit that “wood, paper and cardboard” might be considered as incinerator fuel. He repeated this twice.

Last year the High Court ruled, when protesters fought the change of fuels of a local incinerator to rubber tyres and tarmac, that the original licence for burning did not have to be amended, nor additional planning permission sought, for this change in fuels. So, one day paper, the next rubber…it’s all the same to the law!

POISONED PENINSULA DECOMMISSIONING

2009-05-26T05:37:00.000-07:00

Pyrolysis, the poisoned peninsula and the problems of decommissioning.

The contemporary world faces a toxic legacy: environmental contamination caused by past industrial activities. In Britain most came from gasworks and coke plants which used pyrolysis to convert coal to gas.The by-products of pyrolysis are some of the most carcinogenic compounds known to man. In addition to concentrating pollution geographically, the manufacture of gas and coke displaced it chronologically by creating hazards that would long endure. Today, decades after they ceased production, many of the places where gasworks and coke plants once stood remain contaminated by toxic by-products.

Both the Dome and the Olympic Park had the bad luck to be planned and built on contaminated sites.The experimental nuclear reactor of Queen Mary’s college and its associated contamination provided considerable extra expense for one set of developers and the site of the South Metropolitan Gas company became a nightmare for the Dome builders.

The Greenwich peninsula contained "hot spots" with particularly high concentrations and quantities of hazardous chemicals. One of these was a big underground tar tank which had been shattered by a Luftwaffe bomb. But the chemicals left in the ground by years of spills and leakages dotted around the site had spread widely with the flow of groundwater. One type of waste, a catalyst contaminated with cyanide, was used as a foundation for roads there. The decontamination work has involved pumping up contaminated water and separating out the noxious chemicals, and taking 200,000 tons away in hundreds of lorry loads of the most contaminated soil to landfill sites (where are they now?) at a cost initially projected at 10.5 million but ended up half complete at 185 million.Any further development there can only be strictly curtailed, and a Japanese buyer walked away.

When any modern technology has at its base the physical chemistry process of pyrolysis it has the problem of how to dispose of the ash and tar.First there will be the storage costs,then the decomissioning.Be sure they will be fully accounted for in the contract, and not, like in the nuclear industry, left to be picked up by the local council tax payer.

2009-05-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

Quick Burn-Fast Buck, the Perverse incentives to Pollute and Commercial Confidentiality

Virtually all the serious breaches of incinerator emissions laws in America and France are related to the burner being paid by the lorry-load. The slower burn is the safer burn, the completer burn. What happens when you want to burn those autumn leaves quicker, and put too much on the bonfire? It gets smoky straightaway and sometimes even goes out.
So, when an incinerator is commissioned, and has test burns for about a year,(England’s newest and best…Colnbrook….has been having problems here), people can work out the maximum rate of inputs to the burner air flows and the chimney draughts and ash catching methods. It’s like tuning a tuba, or a horn. So people can come up with optimum speeds for doing the job right.

France had an incinerator company, with government connections, whose management told the workforce to become “more productive”. In order to deal with more lorries they shut down the safety equipment (the chimney ash collectors),speeded up the screw feed drives and did this all at night, so that the inhabitants did not see the plume of smoke this tinkering produced. The local cancer rates shot up and , the locals blogged,7,000 cattle had to be slaughtered because of becoming “dioxinated”.

In the USA more than half of the breaches reported by a federal agency were related to speeding up the feed drives or bypassing the safety chimneys, or both.

Do you want “commercial confidentiality” to block public oversight of these issues? Do you really trust any government to put public safety first, above their version of a cost-benefit equation (where the mortality figures are often skewed)?

NEW PLANNING STEAMROLLER

2009-05-22T03:52:00.000-07:00

The new planning fix, councils’ duty of care and faux-consultations

The incinerator industry don’t want health effects and real before and after pollutant monitoring to be discussed now…they want it as part of the “planning process”, somewhere a long way down the line. The new legislation that the Labour government has brought in to steamroller Nuclear and Heathrow 3 can be just as easily used for Incinerators. It is a very different planning regime than the one we have got used to. More draconian, shorter, more limited witnesses, less appeal.
Councils are saying that there are lots of technologies out there…you bet there are….clean, dirty and very dirty….but they say they aren’t expert enough to decide what they should be (this is a real problem the country round) and will leave it to the chosen contractor. Really!?
What about their duty of care to the community, not only their own, but those neighbouring ones that are not part of the consultation process, but will be affected by burner accidents and chimney “leaks”. They will be footing the bill for disasters, not the PFI profiteers. They will be the ones in court using our council tax to fund their defence in cases of alleged negligence, like that in the High Court now about Corby.
The public should be consulted on the type of contract, the safety monitoring and frequency and independence of inspection regimes, the health monitoring of nearby nursery and primary schools, the pregnancy outcomes in the surrounding areas. Instead we are infantilised by badly structured documents where health was not even an option…….

ASH AND PLASMA GAS

2009-05-22T02:09:00.000-07:00

We are all going to have to understand a bit more about "Technologies", the new PR buzzword used to cover a multitude of sins.There are certainly many varied approaches some more profitable than others....but you are never going to compost plastics or tyres or tarmac or asbebestos or electricals or pesticides.So here goes..with all credits to the British Society of Ecological Medicine

The Problem of Ash

The incineration of waste produces a large amount of ash, amounting to 30% of the weight of the original waste; 40-50% of the volume of compacted waste. This is important as landfill sites are becoming less and less available so there is an urgent need for a workable alternative. It is clear that incineration will not solve the landfill problem since it can only reduce the bulk by just under half. Little thought has been given to this and incinerator operators are still being given 20 to 30 year contracts creating problems for the future.
Incinerators produce two types of ash, bottom ash and fly ash, sometimes called air pollution control (APC) residues. The latter is highly toxic and listed as an absolute hazardous substance in the European Waste Catalogue. It has high concentration of heavy metals and dioxins. Many substances such as metals have little toxicity before incineration but become hazardous once converted to particulates or fine particles in the ash. In fact, the combination of pollutants in the fly ash can amplify the toxicity. Using a biological test, researchers found that the toxicity in fly ash was five times greater than could be accounted for by the content of dioxins, furans and PCBs303.Fugitive ash is the stuff that leaks out of the holes, and is a local problem.
There is a basic problem with modern incinerators. The less air pollution produced, the more toxic the ash. Early incinerators emitted large volumes of dioxins. These emissions have been significantly reduced, but at the cost of a corresponding increase in the fly ash, with similar increases in heavy metals and other toxic chemicals. An incinerator burning 400,000 tonnes of waste annually for its 25 years of operation would produce approximately half a million tonnes of highly toxic fly ash3. Apart from vitrification, no adequate method of disposing of fly ash has been found. The EU Commission have stated that leaching from landfill sites may be one of the most important sources of dioxins in the future. Heavy metals are known to have high leachability. The US Environmental Protection Agency considers that all landfills eventually leach through their liners. Most of the pollutants are very long lasting indeed and bioaccumulate.

Advanced Thermal Technologies (ATT) and Plasma Gasification

In contrast with non-thermal methods, any thermal method of dealing with waste carries an inherent risk of causing fatalities. Because of this thermal methods should only be used for residual waste after full separation of recyclables has taken place. If thermal methods are used, these should always be the safest ones available. In effect this means plasma gasification or gasification using the Thermoselect process. Japan has more experience of incineration than any other country and has started to use plasma gasification as a safer alternative to incineration. Plasma gasification is also in use in Canada.
Plasma gasification achieves the final objective by disposing of the residual waste after separation and recycling and other separating technologies such as mechanical-biological treatment. It can deal safely with the most hazardous types of waste and can produce up to three times as much energy as incineration.
Gasification has been employed by the natural gas industry for over 80 years but has not, so far, been used extensively for dealing with waste, although such plants are now in operation in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Japan. Gasification produces high temperatures and can thermally decompose complex and hazardous organic molecules into gases and benign simple substances. Plasma refers to the gas when it has become ionized and this happens when an electric current is passed through the gas. A very important distinction from incineration is that it does not produce ash. The gas cleaning process can convert many contaminants into environmentally benign and useful by-products. The abatement equipment of incinerators and gasification units is very different. If the abatement equipment in an incinerator fails, as is all too common, people downwind from the installation will be subjected to dangerous pollution. If the abatement equipment in a gasification unit fails it will cause serious damage to the plant itself – so the plant has to be built to a much higher quality.
In a plasma gasification plant, the residual toxic substances including metals become encapsulated in silicate which is like being encased in stone. The plant will remove the toxic and persistent compounds from plastics and other chemicals and reform them. A good quality plasma gasification unit will not produce any adverse residues or by-products, only synthesis gas, silica, sulphur and salt. Synthesis gas is a useful by-product which can be used as a fuel; ─ a major financial advantage which allows the capital costs of the unit to be paid within a 7 year period. Although it is a relatively expensive process, it is far cheaper than incineration once the health costs are taken into account . Note also that it would not incur costs under the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme, potentially saving millions of pounds annually. A recent review of plasma gasification considered it to be a promising alternative to older technologies

ENCLOSED FACILITIES WITH CHIMNEY

2009-05-22T01:46:00.000-07:00

The “Enclosed facilities with a Chimney Report” SLWP Feb 2009

Or how to fool most of the people some of the time (page 29)

Would you trust a bunch of administrators who were so frightened of an open public discussion of incineration, that they used those words to describe an incinerator, and hid the new hazardous waste streams that central government expects to be handled locally?

Rubber tyres
Tarmac
Pesticides
Animal bodies?
Asbestos
Radioactive medical waste
Infectious medical waste

Transported over public roads to a site where the dusts fly up the chimney or the ash leaks out the gaps or gets spread around the site, in house building materials or motorway foundations to leak its poisons slowly into the groundwater. Chimney ash washes collected in ponds for our new rains to flood, or even brand new collecting bags to burst.

Inspection regimes that are a joke because they ask permission in advance, are rare, don`t prosecute gross breaches and take no account of the “turn off and on” pollution peaks.

PFI contracts that leave all the clean up costs of accidents to the councils and take all the profits (like the nuclear industry).

But you don’t have to worry, because you won’t be asked your opinion on any of those questions. They are far too important for you to have a view on. Trust the incinerator industry and the Environment Agency to know what’s best, and all those MPs in Westminster…who have no financial connections with any of this whatsoever.
As none of this is happening you don’t need to monitor any health issues as a baseline, or set up pollution control monitoring of earth, air and water. You don’t have to count stillbirths, malformations and infant deaths before and after, or look very closely at the cancer rates…its just not businesslike, is it?

INCINERATOR HORMONES and REBRANDING

2009-05-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

There’s a massive re-branding of incinerators going on. The government and the international incinerator builders know they must change the public’s mind about their terrible image .The history of numerous serious accidents, deliberate flouting of regulations to ghastly effect and just incompetence and human error have left a bad taste in the mouth.
So, Modern Thermal Treatment, Energy from Waste and Biogas have sprung into being as the flag wavers of experimental methods of mass waste disposal. The London Waste Board is supposed to plan our future, but it is “packed” with people who have vested interests in incineration. The South London Waste Plan started a consultation, which it then stopped half way. Its promised to collect and share the replies of people who had taken the trouble to attend, but this has been hidden away in appendices. Some of its groups were prevented from discussing their worries on the night. There is a suggestion that they only need to have shown willing, a spurious consultation, to get their licence to “buy” an incinerator.
The problem is that there is very big money involved here. The other problem is that some of the worst potential effects are delayed, by which time the birds will have flown. The serious air pollution you will be able to measure straight away (if you are allowed), but the peak of cancers come twenty years later. The way to understand the problem of dioxins is to know they are like the body’s own hormones. These chemical messengers of the blood and brain are very, very, tiny, weigh next to nothing …but are just the right shape to be “recognised” and their message understood. If you think of some of the most important ones, the steroids, they are shaped a bit like the Olympic rings logo, you would be surprised and shocked to see that dioxins and furans have a very similar shape. The body mistakes them for “messengers”…and switches on by mistake (millions of cancer doses in a gram).
Japan is the country that has most incinerators, and has burned for longest in the world. It was also fire-bombed extensively in the war. The meat and milk it ate came from its own fields, and its animals had concentrated the chemicals, which are naturally indestructible. Its cancer rates have doubled since the war, and it now has the highest rate of male colorectal caner in the world (WHO 2005). DEFRA, the government body responsible for selling the safety of incinerators has a track record of its own….It sacked the scientist who discovered that BSE might move to humans and thus delayed effective action…it mismanaged the first foot and mouth outbreak and started the second one all by itself! It tried to rush the Royal Society (independent scientists) into agreeing that incinerators were safe, but they refused.
There is one potentially safe method of incineration that uses very high temperatures and turns everything into glass…but it is expensive, and much less profitable (PLASMA-GAS). I bet we will be offered “cheap and dirty”, so the profits can roll. Shame about the hundreds of thousands who will live under the plume and not have been given any voice.

THE PLUME Croydon Town Centre Petition

2009-05-18T01:01:00.000-07:00

Many residents who live within the wind rose area signed the petition on Saturday 17th May. The image shows the potential area that could be affected by 100ft stack - known as a wind rose - if an incinerator was built in Beddington.