Local Elections : It’s Half-Truth vs. Half-Truth as San Marcos Trash Vote Nears : Effects on Health Central to Debate

The company that hopes to win voter approval next Tuesday to build the trash-to-energy plant in San Marcos strongly suggests in its campaign material that it has the support of Barry Commoner, long considered one of the nation’s foremost environmental consciences.

Commoner, however, is flatly opposed to the San Marcos trash-to-energy plant because it will create dioxins, which are carcinogens.

The opponents of the trash plant like to quote Francis Karasek, generally recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on dioxins, because of his studies linking dioxins to trash incinerator operations.

Karasek, however, favors the San Marcos trash-to-energy plant.

If the campaigners don’t fully state the true positions of the scientists they are relying on--and if the scientists themselves disagree over the health risks of trash-to-energy plants--then woe be the San Marcos voter who must weigh what is perhaps the most basic issue in deciding whether to approve the facility: Are its health risks more acceptable than the alternative ways of disposing garbage?

Trash Sorted

North County Resource Recovery Associates is seeking approval to build a facility where reusable materials such as aluminum, tin, film plastics and cardboard will be taken from the garbage conveyor belt and recycled; toxic materials such as car batteries will be sifted out and disposed of in a landfill, and only the safest combustible material will be used to fire boilers to generate electricity.

The plant will emit 6.3 tons of pollutants each day, the developer says. But those emissions are within the limits of pollution set by the City of San Marcos, the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District and the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Some of the pollution will be toxic, including heavy metals and dioxins. But NCRRA consultants say the chances of increased cancer to a person living in proximity to the plant for seven years are 1 in 5 million; for a person living near the plant for 70 years, the chance of dying of cancer is 2 in 1 million. It is more dangerous, they say, to eat peanut butter.

Such esoteric health risk assessments are based on the expected pollutants to be generated by the plant, each chemical’s expected effect on the human body over a certain period of time based on extrapolations of tests done on animals, and local weather. The assessments are generally skewed on the side of being extremely conservative in their predictions, in order to paint a more alarming picture than would most likely occur in reality.

Safety Claim

There has been no specific testing of the amount of air and groundwater pollution caused by the existing San Marcos landfill, but NCRRA contends that such testing would show it to be a far more dangerous polluter than the trash plant, especially given emissions of vinyl chloride and benzene, based on studies of other landfills.

Opponents of the plant, ranging from the Sierra Club to a group of North County physicians, have campaigned hard on the issue of dioxin emissions and the need for healthier alternatives.

Dioxins are organic chemical compounds proven to cause cancer in animals and used as one of the potent contaminants in Agent Orange. Dioxins are a byproduct of burning--whether it be in a trash incinerator or a home fireplace--and scientists have not yet found a way to prevent their formation or to completely contain them within the burning chamber. The federal EPA has not set safety limits on the emissions of dioxins, saying only that the most technically advanced control equipment must be employed to keep those emissions to the minimum.

But so muddied is the debate on health risks and dioxins in particular that both sides of the campaign are linking themselves with experts who, in fact, feel somewhat differently than their purported positions.

First, Commoner.

Campaign literature supporting the trash plant states, “as Dr. Commoner has pointed out, the best way to minimize all hazardous emissions is to carefully control the composition of the fuel. That’s why Dr. Commoner and other environmentalists support the San Marcos project’s emphasis on separation and removal of recyclable and non-combustible materials before incineration. Dr. Commoner has also endorsed the fact that the San Marcos project is subject to specific emission standards.”

True, as far as that statement goes.

But in a telephone interview with The Times, Commoner said the San Marcos project is nonetheless unacceptable because it will create dioxins.

“It is now clear that the general U.S. population has already absorbed from the environment sufficient dioxins to represent an unacceptable environmental exposure. If that is the case, it is in my mind unacceptable to add to that exposure to any extent,” said Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College in New York City.

Reusing Waste

He said he and fellow researchers believe it is possible to recycle and compost 75% of the nation’s garbage, based on an analysis showing that a full 85% of the nation’s waste can be reused or turned into compost.

To that end, his center is under contract with the Long Island town of East Hampton to develop a pilot recycling effort among 100 families. It also is under contract with Buffalo, N.Y., to determine the feasibility of a citywide recycling program aimed at reclaiming 75% of the city’s garbage through recycling and composting.

“Probably the main legitimate argument for incineration is that it is easy on the bureaucracy,” Commoner said. “All you have to do is write a contract and forget it. To do our (recycling and composting) system, you have to educate families, arrange for the proper collection of four separate containers (one each for food garbage; paper and cardboard; metals, aluminum and glass, and the fourth for whatever is left) and arrange for composters and recyclers. The administrative burden is considerably greater. Incinerating is easier.”

He said that nations in Europe, which began incinerating trash decades ago and are often cited by trash incinerating interests in the United States for their advanced technology, are now looking more seriously at recycling and composting because of growing awareness in recent years of the risk from dioxins.

Francis Karasek, a professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, has traveled the world and studied dioxins for 10 years.

Karasek and a professor from Germany will be presenting a paper in May at the International Conference on Incineration of Hazardous, Radioactive and Mixed Wastes, being sponsored by UC Irvine in San Francisco.

Karasek’s abstract, quoted often by trash plant opponents, notes that there are literally thousands of trash incinerators around the world--most commonly in Japan and Europe--and that they all produce dioxins, regardless of the plant’s design or the type of material burned.

Karasek told The Times he believes he may be on the advent of proving, in practical application, that the formation of dioxins in incinerators may be blocked with the introduction of chemical inhibitors in the plant itself. Tests will be conducted next month, he said, and if proven successful, it may mark the end of the dioxin problem in the incineration process.

Even with the danger of dioxins, Karasek said, “people still have to burn trash. It’s the only way to do it. There are no other alternatives. In Europe, they’ve been burning garbage for years because they don’t have any landfill areas. In the United States, we’ve been getting away with landfills because we’ve had the land, but we can’t keep it up.”