June 30, 2008

So Called Magic Machines


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Friday, June 27, 2008


International waste management expert Dr. Paul Connett trashed the plasma gasification plants Metro Vancouver proposes to build in coming years to deal with its garbage. Connett was a panel speaker at Abbotsford's Matsqui Centennial Auditorium Monday night, which was attended by about 250 people.

CREDIT: Marcia Downham/Times

International waste management expert Dr. Paul Connett trashed the plasma gasification plants Metro Vancouver proposes to build in coming years to deal with its garbage.






Debate sizzled during a Monday night forum in Abbotsford over Metro Vancouver's plan to build up to six waste-to-energy incinerators, which its detractors say would pose health risks to valley residents.

"As a society we need to have better leadership and really push the basics of reuse, recycle and compost. We should not rely on so called magic machines that claim to cleanly burn our waste," said Dr. Paul Connett, one of the world's leading experts in waste management and a strong advocate for recycling.

Waste-to-energy plants are "incinerators in disguise" and are just a "money trap" hyped up by promoters, he told about 250 people who came to listen to the panel presentation at City Hall.

If Metro Vancouver approves the six incinerators, at a cost of up to $2 billion, valley residents could face serious health implications, he said.

The plants would waste valuable resources, including the resource of trash, and will undermine the efforts to recycle and to consume less, he argued.



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© Abbotsford Times 2008

... click title for full article at url


June 23, 2008

DCC-DDDA & "The Big Lie"


Is this pattern consistent with The Big Lie(b)?

In early June 2008, at a "pre-statutory" or lawyer-driven PR-event, the DCC-DDDA senior project manager appeared to:
  • claim to have no knowledge as to how DCC-DDDA(a) now controls large areas of Sandymount-Strand conveniently labeled by a spin machine as "Poolbeg". This is the area of Sandymount on which DCC-DDDA created a toxic dump which compromises the health of residents at Sean Moore Road, and where it now plans the Waste-To-Toxics incinerator to pollute the air with unmonitored poisons and nano-particles. Is this consistent with The Big Lie(b)?
  • claim no conflict of interest between a financial player owning equity in the IGB site and the same financial player controlling the IGB planning permits. Is this consistent with The Big Lie?
How come a reporter for the Sunday Business Post provides more truth to the public than the DCC-DDDA senior project manager? Is this consistent with The Big Lie?
________________

Banker Mobster Phil Leotarodo Faces Up To Developers
Offsite
Jersey Shore

3 October 2006.
Offshore-offsite meeting out of public view held by DCC-DDDA and unknown others in Spain concerning Sandymount-Strand/Poolbeg.
Present: Anglo Irish Bank management (Bradshaw, Fitzgerald).
Present: Building Developers?
Present: Unknown others.
Excluded: The Public.
Evidence: Documents only partially released under Freedom Of Information Act.
Is this consistent with The Big Lie?

20 February 2007
DCC-DDDA's CEO Paul Maloney request to Environment Minister Dick Roche for DDDA to be given total planning control of massive portions of Sandymount-Strand/Poolbeg, bypassing Public Representatives & Bord Pleanala.
Purported Purpose: "to maximise the city population".
Is this consistent with The Big Lie?

Feb-April 2007.

Environment Minister Dick Roche gave DDDA total planning control of large portions of Sandymount-Strand/Poolbeg, bypassing Public Representatives & Bord Pleanala.
  • Environment Minister Dick Roche passively confirms premature deaths in Dublin City from the proposed incinerator (TD's Dail Question on Environmental Health impact was dismissed - see Board Pleanala or Dail transcripts).

DCC-DDDA Denies Facts To Public

DCC-DDDA refused to release a paper to the board from 3 October 2006 concerning the decision by the DDDA to bid for the IGB site because it "contains information of a commercially sensitive nature".
  • DCC-DDDA refused to release certain files related to its decision to bring massive portions of Sandymount-Strand/Poolbeg under the planning control of the DDDA because it would "cause a substantial and unreasonable interference with or disruption of the other work of the public body".
Frankie Kafka could not phrase it better.

___________________________
(a) DCC-DDDA: DDDA and DCC are effectively the same entity, or two-sides-of-the-same-arse to use Scots-Barking MP George Galloway's phrase, and are summarised as DCC-DDDA.

(b) The Big Lie: "Die Engländer gehen nach dem Prinzip vor, wenn du lügst, dann lüge gründlich, und vor allem bleibe bei dem, was du gelogen hast!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie

--------------

Facts Derived From Sunday Business Post (22 June 2008) believed to be accurate.
Observations & Corrections may be posted as comments or emailed to galwaytent@gmail.com

http://www.tribune.ie/business/news/article/2008/jun/22/docklands-authority-facing-tough-times-as-slowdown/

June 21, 2008

Only Reported in Belfast

Reported in Belfast, Not Reported in Dublin.
___________________________________

Bad weather bursts Meath anti-Incinerator balloon
Saturday, June 21, 2008
A planned balloon launch by an Anti-Incinerator lobby in County Meath has been cancelled due to bad weather.

The North East Anti-Incineration Group is campaigning against plans to build a second facility in the county - planning permission has already been granted for an incinerator near Duleek.

However the group will still be holding a submissions advice clinic in Nobber Parish Hall from 2pm this afternoon.

June 20, 2008

The Village People

Friends Promoting The Dublin Bay Incinerator
[Bord Pleanala, Croke Park, 19 April 2007.]


More Friends Promoting The Dublin Bay Incinerator


People In The Photo


  • Why has the DCC employee and promoter of the Dublin Bay Waste-To-Toxics incinerator spent a whole year wasting peoples time running what smells like a Village Design Statement charade?
  • Having already spent €19,000,000 of our money on a cynically one-sided and what the dogs in the street seem to view as a rigged series of Oral Hearings, why is his fellow promoter of the Dublin Bay Waste-To-Toxics incinerator now fighting Panda in court with more of our cash in an apparent attempt to recreate a monopoly to create cash-flow for foreign waste corporations?
  • By suggesting a timetable, what conversations is he apparently having behind closed doors with the allegedly independent EPA about the Dublin Bay Waste-To-Toxics incinerator?
  • Why is one of the lawyers in the photograph reported to have run a fund-raising or promotional event for presidential elections in a foreign country - the country in which the foreign Waste-To-Toxics (WTT) organisation has a HQ? This organisation has a record of fines, violations and lawsuits. Its two proposed WTT's for Dublin seem to be special entities incorporated in Luxembourg and in The Virgin Islands. What are they hiding or afraid of?
______________
DCC-DDDA Bunker, Wood Quay:
"Who arranged the Village Design meeting precisely timed to match The European Cup Semi-Final on June 25, 2008 at 19:45?
Who, for the third time in a row selectively did not mail-drop local houses again? They deserve a medal."

"Can we blame the same Polish Plumber who also did not do the mail drop like we told her to do for the March 2008 meeting? Or was that for the DCC-DDDA Incinerator meeting at the GAA Sports Club, built on the dump? So unfortunate!
"

June 18, 2008

I See Nothing, Nothing!

Public Consultation Sessions and The Big Lie.

OUTLAW TERRITORY NOW INSIDE DDDA's EMPIRE.

At the cynically titled DDDA public consultation sessions in June 2008, the DDDA person titled as senior project manager was backed up by two expensive consultants. One of the consultants isfrom the organisation promoting the waste-to-toxins incinerator. The other consultant seems to know as little about air quality as DCC's expert (but probably does not do sums with percentages to claim the air is safe).

This fine team claimed to know nothing about:
  • How private companies now own large sections of Sandymount Strand (Fabrizia Site, IGB Site).
  • Poisons currently leaking onto Sandymount Strand from the Dump (Sean Moore Park) The DCC-DDDA reps claimed Sean Moore Park could be dug up and processed through the proposed incinerator.
  • The perversity where DDDA, a Docklands entity, controls a public park (Sean Moore Park) but the same Docklands entity does not control any of the actual docklands, vast areas on both sides of the Liffey.
  • The conflict of interest wherein DDDA owns equity in the IGB site and also controls the planning permits for the IGB site.
  • The complete lack of maps of DDDA's territory and its schemes, apparently, other than a Big Lie photograph.
  • Claims the DDDA website is up-to-date and is Meaningful Information. The public information sessions were not advertised on the DDDA website. Or maybe the sessions are buried in some obscure place in a white font (Seil Gib?? Accuracy in Depth?).
  • Why strongly imply an Environmental Impact study by advertising the consultant in an expensive taxpayer funded brochure when the study "has not yet" been done (another Big Lie Technique) ?
  • Why advertise and imply an Economics Study by a Property-Industry company, and claim the Property-Industry has no conflict of interest?
  • Why there are no economics scenarios for public discourse? Apart from the moronic word 'growth' in the first paragraph which they could not explain?
  • Why apparently spin that DDDA could use business scenarios done by someone else when DDDA is now actively propositioning to use up €5 billion of taxpayer money?
  • Why was the notice of the alleged statutory public consultation published in a newspaper on a Bank Holiday weekend. And not on the DDDA website. And why there was no mail-shot to local houses (Big Lie Technique)?
  • Why would building developers erect thousands of luxury rabbit-hutch flats on a toxic dump beside the incinerator, a huge poisons emitter?
  • Apparently Big Money building developers did not appear at the Bord Pleanala or EPA Incinerator hearings. Will building developers use these poisoned sites as a trade-off for their social housing commitments, despite the apparent fact that people living beside Sean Moore Road, built on the dump, have compromised health?
  • Apparently the DDDA employee titled as 'senior project manager' had no in-depth business information on the DDDA, on the DDDA board members, on who appointed them, nor on their business interests. But there was a response from the DDDA-DCC team where they wondered if Leaving Cert results for DDDA Board should be published.

June 14, 2008

European Incinerators Import Mexican Dioxin Sources.

  • The Beast Must Be Fed: Mexico now sends PCBs to Europe for incineration, exposing the compounds to loss at sea.
  • "Incineration is a Dinosaur Technology." : Neil Carman, a former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality inspector who now works with the Sierra Club's Lone Star chapter. Carmen said the EPA's position is "absurd" because "incineration is a dinosaur technology."

  • Carman said there are EPA-approved, non-burn technologies that could be used to dispose of the compounds in Mexico.

  • Environmentalists say the Texas Incinerator released 1,933 pounds of PCBs into the air in 2006.

________________________________________
Full Article from Houston & Texas News is here:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5834705.html

June 12, 2008, 11:44PM
Port Arthur site set to burn toxic PCBs
EPA about to let Mexican imports be destroyed there

By MATTHEW TRESAUGUE
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

PORT ARTHUR — The west end of this Gulf Coast refinery town is a weedy pocket of poverty, with blocks of shuttered storefronts and blue tarps still covering the rooftops of houses damaged by Hurricane Rita nearly three years ago.

Hilton Kelley, 47, sees his neighborhood's commercial activity moribund, its residents sick, its children with nothing to do, and he blames the fire-and-fume-belching cluster of oil and petrochemical plants around Port Arthur.

Now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is poised to grant a request by the operator of a Port Arthur incinerator to import up to 20,000 tons of highly toxic PCBs from Mexico for their disposal. To many people living on the city's predominantly black west end, the proposal is the ultimate affront.

"This adds insult to injury," said Kelley, who heads the Community In-Power and Development Association. "Enough is enough already."

Veolia Environmental Services' petition comes nearly 30 years after legislation that banned the manufacture of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, also prohibited bringing them into the United States. The EPA ruled in 1996 that the chemical compounds may be brought into the country for incineration, but a federal appeals court overturned the decision.

Agency officials, echoing the reasons for reversing the ban a decade ago, argue that the destruction of PCBs in this country is safer than allowing stockpiles to fester in Mexico and other nations.

But critics contend that there are cleaner, safer disposal methods for PCBs. When burned, they produce dioxin, which is linked to cancer, brain damage, reproductive problems and other ailments in humans.

Despite precautions, incinerators emit minute quantities that enter the food chain through meat, dairy products and fish — leading some to wonder why Port Arthur residents should again shoulder such an onerous burden.

"They're getting all of the emissions and none of the prosperity," said Jim Blackburn, a Houston-based environmental attorney who represented Port Arthur residents in a recent lawsuit over Motiva Enterprises' expansion plans. "Why should we make an exception to put more pollution on a community that already has taken on more than its fair share?"

Environmentalists have dubbed the area "The Cancer Belt," but there is no proven link to the refineries and Jefferson County's cancer rate, which was 23 percent higher than the state overall, according to the Texas Cancer Registry's most recent data.

Refinery to expand

The health problem is part of the plight of Port Arthur, where the median household income is about $35,000 a year, less than half of Sugar Land. While there isn't much left of downtown, new houses, restaurants and big-box stores are sprouting along the corridor leading to Beaumont and away from the biggest plants.

Last year Motiva began an expansion that will more than double the capacity of its Port Arthur refinery to 600,000 barrels a day by 2010 and make it the largest in the country. The plant is across the street from the Carver Terrace public housing project.

The Army also began shipping 1.7 million gallons of a nerve gas byproduct called hydrolysate from Indiana to Veolia's incinerator, located about five miles west of downtown on Texas 73. The contract is worth $49 million.

Veolia applied to import PCBs in November 2006 before receiving the Army contract. Under the proposal, the company would ship the compounds by truck through Houston to Port Arthur — a distance of about 460 miles from entry points in Brownsville and Laredo.

Mexico now sends PCBs to Europe for incineration, exposing the compounds to loss at sea. The transportation cost for overseas shipment is at least three times more expensive than moving the waste from Monterrey, Mexico, to Port Arthur, according to the company.

Plant's estimate

The Veolia facility, permitted to handle up to 150,000 tons of hazardous waste per year, burns between 20 million and 30 million pounds of PCB wastes from domestic sources annually. Mitch Osborne, the plant's general manager, said smokestack tests show the incinerator destroys more than 99 percent of the material.

But environmentalists are not so sure about the plant's safety record, pointing to the 1,933 pounds of PCBs that it reported releasing into the air in 2006, the most recent data available.

The plant alone accounted for more than two-thirds of the PCB releases nationwide, according to the federal Toxics Release Inventory, which is based on industry estimates.

Osborne said the plant's estimate is wrong because of a bookkeeping error. In correspondence with the EPA last month, company officials said the amount should be less than one pound.

"If we didn't think we could do it safely, then we wouldn't bring it here," Osborne said. "We have proven our capability over 15 years. It's safer to burn here than to leave it in place."

The EPA apparently agrees.

Position called absurd

The agency is proposing a one-year exemption for Veolia to import and burn the PCBs because the company "has demonstrated that no unreasonable risk to health or the environment would result," EPA spokeswoman Roxanne Smith said.

The agency also contends that because the proposal poses no unreasonable health hazards to Port Arthur's residents, there is no "environmental justice" issue.

Neil Carman, a former Texas Commission on Environmental Quality inspector who now works with the Sierra Club's Lone Star chapter, said the EPA's position is "absurd" because "incineration is a dinosaur technology."

Carman said there are EPA-approved, non-burn technologies that could be used to dispose of the compounds in Mexico. A process called chemical dechlorination, for example, treats the PCB waste with a liquid agent that breaks down the toxins by removing their chlorine components.

"It's inexcusable for Veolia to burn PCBs because they don't all burn up," Carman said, adding that the Sierra Club would sue if the EPA grants the plant's request. "This could set a precedent that opens up the floodgates."

matthew.tresaugue@chron.com

June 13, 2008

Outlaw Incinerators Are Immune

Industry Myth: "The incineration industry is the most tightly regulated and monitored industry in the UK."

Fact: This is a complete red herring. The regulations are meaningless and the monitoring is a joke.

The regulations are based on what is technically feasible rather than what is safe.
  • There is little to no monitoring of some of the most toxic substances created by incineration.
  • Dioxin monitoring occurs no more than twice a year.
  • Incinerator operators regularly break their legal limits with impunity.

A report released by Greenpeace this year, based on the Environment Agency's own records of emissions breaches reported by incinerator operators,
  • Greenpeace revealed that England's 10 operating incinerators had exceeded their 1999 and 2000 pollution limits 553 times.
  • Only one Environment Agency prosecution resulted.
The Greenpeace report reached the inevitable conclusion that incineration is an unreliable and dangerous technology incapable of being regulated with proper regard to human health and the environment.

________________
Sources:
East Galway Against Incineration,

http://toxicdump.net/incineratorMyths.htm

GreenPeace
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/3809.PDF

Inferno At Incinerator



Pollution billows from the incinerator Thursday morning, June 12, 2008.

It was the second fire this year at the incinerator, located in Panama City, Florida.
...
The threat of fire sparking in an incinerator cannot be eliminated, Lovett added. "It's an issue that comes with operation of an incinerator."
...

"It will be smoking for a few days probably. I'll dread coming to work tomorrow if that wind shifts and we have to breath that in," Creamer said.

By late afternoon Thursday, Lovett said the smoke had almost entirely dissipated. "There is no health risk."

June 12, 2008

Irish State before the European Court on Environmental Planning (EIA)

Eight individuals from Cork and the Ringaskiddy Residents Association have appealed the High Court decision to the Supreme Court and the legal proceedings will be heard by the Supreme Court on 9th June 2008. The applicants are asking for an adjournment of the two Judicial Reviews until after the European Court has ruled on the European Commission (EC) Case against Ireland.

The Irish State is due before the European Court on the grounds of non-compliance with the EC Directive on Environmental Planning (EIA).

  • The EC has stated that in its opinion Ireland has failed to comply with European Law in relation to proper Environmental Assessment for major projects.

The adjournment of the Judicial Reviews is being sought as this non-compliance is one of the legal points of argument in both cases. A spokesperson for CHASE said that the Supreme Court decision is "a matter of great concern to us and to anyone looking for proper implementation of planning laws".

June 11, 2008

Homer Bypasses Incinerator "Controls"

European Best Practice: There is no enforcement of poisons at UK incinerators.

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POISONS: UK PLANT TOLD 'CLEAN UP YOUR ACT'

JON ROBINSON ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT, Nottingham Post Media Group, Castle Wharf House, Nottingham NG1 7EU. 10 June 2008

The Environment Agency has issued Nottingham's Eastcroft incinerator with an enforcement notice and formal warning.

It comes after unfiltered emissions were released on two separate occasions on April 18.

The enforcement notice requires the Waste Recycling Group (WRG), which operates the site, to undertake a comprehensive review of the maintenance programme in place for the flue gas treatment system.

The pollution was caused by a faulty temperature probe which allowed the emissions to bypass a filter bag.

WRG must submit a report to the Environment Agency by the end of June, detailing the findings of the review and deadlines for improvements.
Failure to comply with the notice is a criminal offence.
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8 Nottingham Post readers have commented on this story. Click here to read their views.

Stating that they have a compliance rate of 99.99% is a distortion of the facts.

WRG only constantly monitor 6 of the hundreds of poisons, some are checked for a few minutes every 6 months, while the vast majority are never checked.

What a load of rubbish!

Eastcroft should be phased out and shut down, not expanded. join the fight www.nail.uk.net
Jon Beresford - NAIL, Brinsley, Nottingham