Health Risk From Trash Plant Is Minimal, Backers’ Study Says

Proponents of the controversial trash incinerator proposed for San Diego have completed a lengthy assessment of the project’s impact on public health and concluded that the massive plant poses “no significant health risk.”

The multivolume report, presented Tuesday to the citizens’ advisory board on the SANDER project, asserts that the risk of cancer posed by plant pollution at the maximum point of impact over 70 years is between .06 in a million and 9 in a million.

For purposes of comparison, the report contends that the cancer risk posed by eating four tablespoons of peanut butter a day over a lifetime is 2,800 in a million, and that the risk of cancer from natural background radiation while living at sea level is 1,400 in a million.

“That’s an insignificant health risk,” said Alan Eschenroeder, a consultant to Signal Environmental Systems, the firm hoping to build the plant. “ . . . A decision-maker has to weigh these risks against other involuntary risks that society has accepted.”

The question of the health effects of the giant plant, which would be built in Kearny Mesa north of the Interstate 805-Route 163 interchange, has become the central issue in an expanding public debate over whether to go through with the project.

The plant would be one of the biggest polluters in San Diego County. According to Signal, it would emit nearly four tons of pollutants a day. Those include a range of known and suspected carcinogens, including dioxins, cadmium, arsenic and aromatic hydrocarbons.

Critics of the project, including the local chapter of the American Lung Assn. and a local society of allergists, have argued that the health effects of those contaminants and others are too significant and too poorly understood to justify building the facility.

On Tuesday, critics were unfazed by Signal’s arguments.

“This is not going to change our opinion at all,” said Janet Brown, an anti-SANDER activist from Tierrasanta. “Pollution is pollution. We feel as long as there is going to be any risk to our children, the elderly and health-conscious citizens here, we should not be asked to bear that risk.”

“One in a million is still too many,” said Bob Glaser, a consultant to a group called San Diegans for Clean Air. “And I base that not on comparing it to other forms of death, which seems to be acceptable to Signal.”

Last week, the group began circulating petitions aimed at amending the city’s General Plan to cover incinerators. Among other things, the initiative would require that an incinerator be located at least three miles from hospitals and schools and contribute no new air pollution.

Critics such as Brown and Glaser argue that the city has failed to consider alternative ways of solving the city’s impending shortage of landfill space. Among those methods cited by critics are experimental gasification processes, composting and, above all, recycling.

Today, the subject of alternatives comes before the City Council’s Public Services and Safety Committee. The city manager’s office intends to recommend that the regulatory review of SANDER continue and that the city “continue to examine” alternatives.

Signal officials contended Tuesday that that would only help their case.

“I feel if we were analyzed on an equal footing, it would be to the benefit of this project,” said regional director Frank Mazanec, who said recent studies suggest pollution from landfills is worse than pollution from an incinerator like SANDER.

Said Bernie Rhinerson of The Stoorza Company, a marketing communications firm that represents Signal, “There is no way to dispose of waste that won’t add to air pollution.”

SANDER, also known as the San Diego Energy Recovery project, would incinerate 2,250 tons of the city’s trash a day, or approximately 45% of the trash currently dumped in Miramar landfill. It would generate enough electricity for 60,000 homes.

It is being promoted as a partial answer to the expectation that Miramar landfill will be full by 1995. City officials, who have signed a tentative agreement with Signal, estimate that SANDER could push back that date to 2005.

The site was arrived at after several other locations in the county were considered and rejected by the city and county for various reasons. The Kearny Mesa site is considered desirable because of its proximity to major highways and the Miramar landfill, and the availability of a large parcel of land.

However, critics note that it would also generate hundreds of tons of ash each day.

Currently, the California Energy Commission is scrutinizing the proposal and will decide whether to grant Signal a permit. That decision is expected early next year, after which the City Council must decide whether to affirm its initial support.

Mazanec said he hopes construction might begin next spring.

The health risk assessment aired Tuesday by Signal and its consultants is a revised version of an earlier study. The energy commission, which assesses such proposals for the state, had asked for further information and assessment after Signal submitted the first one.

In an interview Tuesday, consultant Eschenroeder described the process of the health risk assessment--a technique developed just a decade ago in which specialties such as engineering, biology, meteorology and statistics are blended in order to evaluate environmental hazards.

First, Eschenroeder listed some 39 chemical compounds, metals and other emissions expected to be discharged from the plant. Among them were chromium, copper, lead, mercury, selenium, chlorine, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, polychlorinated biphenyls and vinyl chloride.

Those making the assessment then determined the various routes by which the pollutants would make their way into the human body. Those included air, soil, ground water and surface water, such as lakes Murray and Miramar, which are located near the plant.

According to Eschenroeder, they considered such things as children playing in the dirt, families eating home-grown vegetables, babies receiving contaminants through mother’s milk, consumption of fish from the two lakes, differences in outdoor activities among different age groups, contaminated particles tracked into living rooms and stirred up by vacuum cleaners, and numerous other variables.

He insisted repeatedly that the underlying assumptions were always conservative.

For example, the consultants assumed that the “human receptor” lived at the maximum point of impact for 70 years, even though the expected life of the facility is only 30 years. They considered “improbable combinations” of worst-case scenarios such as plant breakdown, unfavorable weather, fumigation and the presence of especially sensitive people.

“We have a whole pile-up of numbers that bias it upwards,” Eschenroeder said.

In the end, they concluded that .06 in a million is the “most probable estimate” of the risk of cancer. Eschenroeder said “most probable estimate” means that there is a 50-50 chance that that figure is correct.

The report said that a “conservative estimate” would be 2.2 in a million and the “95% confidence estimate” is 3.2 in a million. The “upper limit estimate,” or level allowing 98% confidence, is 9 in a million.

“I think you have to realize that there is a range of numbers,” said Eschenroeder. “ . . . It’s a matter of the decision-makers’ taste, or what stomach they have for uncertainty, as to which number they want to use.”

Eschenroeder insisted that, regardless of what risk one chooses, they were all insignificant, especially when compared to the general risk for cancer, which he said is 250,000 in a million, or one in four.

The report said the cancer risk from eating four tablespoons of peanut butter daily is 2,800 in a million--a risk Eschenroeder attributed to aflatoxin, a toxin produced by a mold that may be present in peanut products and has a carcinogenic effect in experimental animals.

Critics, however, insist any increase in cancer risk from SANDER is too great.

Glaser, owner of The La Jolla Group, the political consulting firm that managed the 1985 campaign for the growth-management initiative, Proposition A, said San Diegans for Clean Air commenced its petition campaign last week and intended to collect 80,000 signatures by June.

The campaign for the initiative, which has chosen for its logo a smokestack that is in fact the barrel of a revolver, argues that the plant would not solve the landfill crisis because it would generate hundreds of tons of ash each day that would still have to be land-filled.

It contends that other waste-disposal systems are available; that dioxins would be generated by burning plastic; that the plant would require 2 million to 3 million gallons of water daily for cooling, and that the electricity produced could prove more expensive than energy from other sources.

The initiative would require that any incinerator cause no increase in air pollution and use no drinking water for cooling. It would also require that all plastics, metals, coatings and industrial wastes be removed from the waste stream for recycling rather than burning.

“What we’re trying to do is say if you’re going to build one, we want some sanity as to what risks are being taken,” said Glaser.