on incinerator burner, there is one oil pump and have two tube for Suction Line and Return Line.
Another challenge: disposing of waste
A single Ebola patient treated in a U.S. hospital will generate eight 55-gallon barrels of medical waste each day.
Protective gloves, gowns, masks and booties are donned and doffed by all who approach the patient’s bedside and then discarded. Disposable medical instruments, packaging, bed linens, cups, plates, tissues, towels, pillowcases and anything that is used to clean up after the patient must be thrown away.
Even curtains, privacy screens and mattresses eventually must be treated as contaminated medical waste and disposed of.
Dealing with this collection of pathogen-filled debris without triggering new infections is a legal and logistical challenge for every U.S. hospital now preparing for a potential visit by the virus.
In California and other states, it is an even worse waste-management nightmare.
While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends autoclaving (a form of sterilizing) or incinerating the waste as a surefire means of destroying the microbes, burning infected waste is effectively prohibited in California, and banned in several other states.
“Storage, transportation and disposal of this waste will be a major problem,” California Hospital Association President C. Duane Dauner warned Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in a letter last week.
Even some states that normally permit incineration are throwing up barriers to Ebola waste.
In Missouri, the state attorney general has sought to bar Ebola-contaminated debris from a St. Louis incinerator operated by Stericycle Inc., the nation’s largest medical waste disposal company.
Due to restrictions on burning, California hospital representatives say their only option appears to be trucking the waste over public highways and incinerating it in another state — a prospect that makes some environmental advocates uneasy.
Rules for transport
Under federal transportation guidelines, the material would be designated a Class A infectious substance, or one that is capable of causing death or permanent disability, and would require special approval from the Department of Transportation, hospital representatives say.
“These are some pretty big issues and they need some quick attention,” said Jennifer Bayer, spokeswoman for the Hospital Association of Southern California.
“We fully expect that it’s coming our way,” Bayer said of the virus. “Not to create any sort of scare, but just given the makeup of our population and the hub that we are. It’s very likely.”
The Ebola virus is essentially a string of genetic material wrapped in a protein jacket. It cannot survive a 1,500-degree scorching within an incinerator, or the prolonged, pressurized steam of an autoclave.
“The Ebola virus itself is not particularly hardy,” CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said under questioning on Capitol Hill recently. “It’s killed by bleach, by autoclaving, by a variety of chemicals.”
However, CDC guidelines note that “chemical inactivation” has yet to be standardized and could trigger worker safety regulations.
Getting ready
California health officials recently tried to reassure residents that the state’s private and public hospitals were up to the task and were actively training for the possible arrival of Ebola.
“Ebola does not pose a significant public health risk to California communities at the present time,” said Dr. Gil Chavez, an epidemiologist and deputy director at the California Department of Public Health. “Let me tell you why: Current scientific evidence specifies that people cannot get Ebola through the air, food or water. … The Ebola virus does not survive more than a few hours on impervious surfaces.”
It was unclear whether California officials viewed the waste issue as a potential problem.
Although one-third of the state’s private hospitals and “a few” of its public hospitals reported to Boxer’s office that there would be problems complying with the CDC’s incineration recommendation, and others, a state public health official told reporters he was not aware of any conflicts.
Dr. David Perrott, chief medical officer for the California Hospital Association, said there was also confusion about whether infected human waste could be flushed down the toilet.
“Here’s what we’ve heard from the CDC: It’s OK,” Perrott said. “But then we’ve heard from some sources, that maybe we need to sterilize it somehow and then flush it down the toilet or you have to check with local authorities. It sounds maybe a little gross, but there is a real question about what to do with that waste.”
Overreaction?
Dr. Thomas Ksiazek, a professor of microbiology and immunology of the University of Texas Medical Branch, has said he believes there’s been a lot of overreaction about Ebola medical waste.
“There are other ways to deal with the waste; autoclaving would be chief among them,” Ksiazek said. “The problem is, most hospitals don’t use it for most disposable items. They’re quite happy to bag them up and send them to a regular medical disposal company.”
But Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said incineration is simple and effective, and should be available to hospitals to help dispose of the mountain of waste.
Hershkowitz said states began to crack down on medical waste incineration years ago because materials that didn’t need to be burned were being sent to combustors and were emitting dangerous pollutants.
In this case of Ebola medical waste, he said California should reconsider its restrictions.
“There’s no pollutant that’s going to come out of a waste incinerator that’s more dangerous than the Ebola virus,” Hershkowitz said. “When you’re dealing with pathogenic and biological hazards, sometimes the safest thing to do is combustion.”
by: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Another-challenge-disposing-of-waste-5909413.php
England’s trash generating Danish heat
Power in Denmark is increasingly being generated in plants burning waste imported from England. The practice is being called an economical and environmental boon on both sides of the equation.
The AVØ incinerator in Frederikshavn produces heating and power for the area by burning trash from England.
“It is mainly construction waste like pieces of wood, cardboard and plastic from Manchester,” AVØ operations manager Orla Frederiksen told DR Nyheder. “I guess we have 600 tonnes here that provide a good combustible mixture we can then turn into district heating and power.”
Good for the bottom line
The incinerator in Frederikshavn has doubled its imports of the English waste in the past year.
Incinerators in Aalborg and Hjørring are also burning British trash.
“The heating we produce using the waste is cheaper than what we can generate with natural gas,” said AVØ head Tore Vedelsdal. “And the British are interested because they lack incinerators and pay heavy taxes on landfills.”
Good for the environment
Vedelsdal said that the environmental angle works for both countries.
“They save on having to bury the waste and we save on the consumption of natural gas,” he said.
READ MORE: Denmark pays most for electricity
Environmental protection agency Miljøstyrelsen said that last year up to 200,000 tonnes of non-hazardous waste from England was incinerated in Denmark – nearly six percent of the total volume of combustible material used.
by: http://cphpost.dk/news/englands-trash-generating-danish-heat.11398.html
Kenya: How Toxic and Infectious Medical Waste Is Harming Citizens
A visit to the hospital does not usually reveal what happens at the back. It is here where discarded blood and body tissues and parts from surgeries, pharmaceuticals, medicine bottles — tonnes of hospital waste — go through. In the case of the Kenyatta National Hospital, this could be as much as one tonne a day estimated to be half the medical waste generated in the city. Quite understandably, it is not usually open to the public.
Most of these normally end up in incinerators — the most affordable medical waste disposal method for most hospitals. But a lot of it slips through the system to get us worried.
Incinerating waste at temperatures between 800-1,100 degrees Celsius kills viruses, bacteria and other pathogens but the ash still contains dangerous heavy metals like mercury and cadmium. Best practice dictates that such ash be buried.
But as this writer found out, this is better said than done. Lack of adequate equipment to safely dispose of waste and failure to observe best practices was a common feature in most hospitals visited in this survey.
From releasing dangerous fumes and ash openly to the environment to dumping medical waste together with general waste, the local medical waste management scene still has a long way to go.
Raw medical waste and toxic ash from incinerators ends up in open dumps like Dandora and Eastleigh posing a health risk to thousands of people salvaging plastic and metal for recycling and residents living nearby. Major hospitals like Kenyatta National Hospital which otherwise have good incinerators have run out of grounds to bury toxic ash. Few hospitals have a scrubber system where fumes are filtered to remove potentially toxic gases including dioxins from burning plastic — a common material discarded by hospitals.
A recent report on the global status of waste management ranks Nairobi as one of the worst in waste management. Residents living near Dandora reported a high number of respiratory diseases and were found to have unacceptably high levels of heavy metals like lead in their blood. Dandora dumpsite reeks of heavy metals which can hinder brain development as our independent tests confirmed.
“Most health facilities take ash from their waste to municipal dumpsites directly or through collectors,” says Mary Kinoti, a lecturer on environmental and occupational health at the University of Nairobi.
Walking through the dumpsite opened during the 1970s reveals unlikely materials that end up here. Lying in the pile of an unsightly mix of plastic bags and organic waste, one often finds bloodied gloves, dressing bandages, needles, discarded drugs and a host of other metals tucked away.
From their small quantities, it is easy to conclude that this come from smaller hospitals, clinics and dispensaries not willing to spend on the proper disposal of waste. Level five hospitals, formerly called provincial hospitals like Nakuru, are mostly well equipped with incinerators that can combust pathological waste into water and ashes, says Kinoti.
A peek at the Dandora dumpsite reveals an unsightly mix of plastic, food remains, animal products and all manner of waste the city discards. Every few minutes a truck makes its way through the mountains of garbage the city has accumulated over decades. The steady stream of trucks falls silent at dusk.
But as dark falls, another set, mostly lone trucks hurriedly enter the dumpsite, quickly offload their contents and make their exit, all within a few minutes — well aware of their wrongdoing. A closer look at the dumped material reveals used needles, bloodied bandages, pharmaceuticals and a host of other waste from hospitals. We even found syphilis and HIV test kits.
Early in the morning, a County Government of Nairobi earth mover turns over the waste mixing it with garbage ready to receive the next batch for the day.
Tens of people descend on the site, sorting the garbage with their bare hands. Their interests are different. While some solely focus on milk packets which they wash in a sewage tunnel, others are interested in salvaging metals from the burnings heaps, fuelled by the excessive gas underneath.
Still others are after the food remains which they collect to feed animals — all determined to make a living. A prick from an infected needle and they could end up with serious infections including HIV.
They all seem too aware of the danger, but they have to feed their children, a man, protected only by a pair of gumboots, says.
The National Environmental Management Authority and the County Government of Nairobi did not respond to our enquiries.
Yet the danger of medical waste in the country does not start or end here. Medical facilities try to safely dispose of their waste to various levels of success. A large number incinerate their waste, but lack the prerequisite air pollution control equipment to guard against materials such as sulphur, known collectively as flue materials, getting into the environment.
In such cases, residents living near such facilities are prone to respiratory infections. Dioxins from plastics are known to cause serious respiratory complications and cancer. A study carried out by a Yale University student recently found that high levels of toxic fumes from incinerators rending the air were responsible for respiratory infections among residents living near such facilities.
A recent report detailed the high levels of heavy metals such as lead in vegetables grown and sold in Nairobi. Lead is a dangerous metal that can cause retardation in children. Some farmers in Kinangop were recently in the spotlight for using sewage to grow their crops largely sold in the city.
Incinerators below standard
Dumping of toxic ash is not the sole problem facing the medical waste management scene. The state of equipment is wanting, some dating several decades ago and ill equipped to minimize pollution.
Most public hospital below level five have de Montfort incinerators where temperatures are not controlled and are likely to pollute as they lack scrubber systems. “Unfortunately this type of incinerators are common in district hospitals and health centres,” Kinoti says.
“A wet scrubber is a compartment where the emissions are sprinkled with water to dissolve air pollutants, and what is released to the environment is clean,” Kinoti explains. Workers are also not well protected in mid-level hospitals. Because of the design of the incinerators, medical waste is loaded manually and workers who mostly do not have protective gear are exposed, she says.
A medium size incinerator costs an average of Sh20 million before installation, clearly a high shot for hospitals. Add the high maintenance costs and the fact that these facilities guzzles several thousands of litres of fuel to run per day and you end up with a very high bill.
“But the high cost of incinerators is no excuse for polluting the environment,” says Kinoti. “Hospital waste contains mercury and can produce furans which are very toxic and can cause cancer and acute respiratory diseases,” she says.
Medical facilities which do not have incinerators are required to have contracts with specialised waste disposal companies to handle their waste. For some, this is just an unnecessary hurdle they have to undergo before acquiring a license to operate a hospital. Little is done to comply. A number do not follow through with these requirements posing a huge health risk to the public and the environment.
Hospitals categorize their waste differently for their safe handling during transport, storage, treatment and disposal, says Bernard Runyenje, assistant chief public health officer, Kenyatta National Hospital.
Highly infectious waste are those expected to be containing highly infectious pathogenic organisms such as bacteria and viruses while general waste may consist of office paper. Usually in red packages, infectious waste require special care throughout the process of waste disposal and are supposed to be treated at source. It is not however unusual to find a worker carrying a yellow or red disposal bag without gloves or any other protective gear.
Tissues that decompose quickly such as amputated limbs are disposed of quickly or put under refrigeration. Most of these highly infectious waste — except radioactive waste — should most appropriately end up at the incinerator, Dr Runyenje says. Most African countries use incineration to dispose of medical waste.
According to Dr Runyenje, incineration should be a controlled process and should happen in an enclosure. But he also admits that incinerators in rural areas do not meet these specifications.
A good incinerator should have more than one chamber where waste is burned in the first chamber, so that there is increased temperature in the second chamber and gases can be burned in the third chamber, he says. At the end of the process, most of the waste has been burned to an acceptable level. Clinics and dispensaries often operating in highly populated areas often flout the regulations, openly burning their waste using paraffin and charcoal to avoid the cost of safe disposal. Half burned waste is easy to spot in dumps on roadsides and quite visible in municipal dumpsites.
Incineration however does not get rid of toxic fumes and heavy metals — if anything it can disperse toxic fumes to a wide areas if not done properly. The scrubber system is designed to reduce such pollution but the system is expensive and most hospitals visited do not have it. The gas from the incinerator is passed through fluid to remove any particulate matter — inside a scrubber system. Such gases may include carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, dioxins and furans which can cause serious diseases such as cancer.
The minimum height of a chimney should be at least 10 feet above the tallest building around to minimise direct exposure to residents. Anything that comes out of the chimney should be dispersed away from nearby buildings.
“Sometimes it is difficult to know what you are emitting to the environment. If you release it directly to human beings, then you expect to have some health issues, whether it is inhalation of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, dioxins or furans,” Dr Runyenje says. A high chimney should not however be seen as a replacement for a scrubber system, adds Kinoti. A high chimney only disperses fumes further to residents who may not even be aware of them, she observes.
To many, including waste managers interviewed, ash from incinerators, or any ash for that matter is not harmful — a misplaced notion that could be contributing to its dumping. The truth is that they contain harmful metals like mercury, lead and cadmium as our independent tests confirmed.
Incineration reduces the waste to about 10 per cent of the original volume. But the remaining ash usually contains very high content of heavy metals. How hospitals and waste disposal companies handle this will determine the health of our environment. Such should usually be buried in sanitary landfills to prevent it from leaching to the ground, but this practice appears rare in the country.
Whether through sheer negligence, or lack of space and facilities or reluctance to meet the associated costs, medical waste nevertheless ends up in our environment. When disposed in open ground, heavy metals easily leach to the groundwater or make a direct way to our food chain.
Bottom ash under normal circumstances should be buried, but most health facilities do not have disposal grounds. These burial grounds are not present either at Dandora where officials claimed the ash was taken to be buried.
Some companies are licensed to handle hazardous waste. However, Dr Runyenje however notes that not many handle general medical waste.
A number of incinerators in public hospitals were in a state of disrepair leaving tonnes of toxic waste piling up and posing a danger to the public.
Kenyatta National Hospital has a ground where tonnes of waste are kept awaiting disposal. Two of its three incinerators are awaiting repair causing a backlog estimated at 170 tonnes.
Its newly acquired incinerator from India is the most advanced among the hospitals visited consisting of two chambers for maximum combustion. The wide network of smoke pipes leads to a chamber where the smoke is passed through a fluid to remove fumes and other residue.
The resulting black slime contains some of the dangerous metals. But the design and structure of the holding area does not meet specifications and some of it seeps to the ground, a source tells us. Its aging incinerators dating back to when the hospital was started are awaiting repair.
The incinerator cannot be operated during the day because the nursing school is just metres away.
The location of incinerators in relation to hospitals, offices and other residential is a common problem in many facilities. The one at the Chiromo School of Physical and Biological Sciences for example is not in operation as it sits near an embassy.
One incinerator in Nakuru County is perilously close to the maternity ward, some smoke go directly to patients.
The scenario plays out in many other hospitals around the country who also lack additional air pollution control equipment.
Ash dumped in open ground are an open feature in a number of leading facilities that could potentially poison ground water through leaching.
Ideally, ash from such waste should be buried in landfills, a practice that was long abandoned in the country.
With people living near such facilities, they are inevitably exposed, and risk serious respiratory infections and serious diseases including cancer. The Kenyatta National Hospital incinerators operate at night to minimise exposure to the students at the School of Nursing barely a dozen metres away.
A source told this writer that the soils were so contaminated they will have to be skimmed off and buried. Meanwhile, residents will have to contend with dangerous, possibly carcinogenic, ash emanating from such facilities.
Larger hospitals like Nairobi Women’s Hospital are stepping in to help smaller ones incinerate their waste. “The cost of the incinerator is too high for them to afford,” says Thomas Imboywa, who is in charge of one of these at the Nairobi Women’s Hospital, one of the largest in the region. On a daily basis, he oversees the safe disposal of the days waste.
The incinerator, a huge blue structure sits on about 100 square metres of space slightly off the main building and sports a high chimney, towering above the nearby building.
“Medical waste is ideally incinerated within 24 hours,” says Imboywa. But when a clinic or hospital does not turn in any waste for weeks on end, it raises eyebrows, Imboywa says. He is familiar with many such cases and the hospital is quick to repudiate such contracts as per their policy. Some medical facilities may just secure a contract with them to wade through National Environmental Authority (Nema) regulations but have no intention to safely dispose of their waste, Imboywa observes.
Those who do not have incinerators are required by Nema to have a contract with hospitals like Nairobi Women’s Hospital to dispose their waste. However, not all medical waste ends up in such specialised facilities. Instead, in places like Kibera they are doused with paraffin and burned in the open.
“But in this case, sharps will remain and the waste can still remain infectious because they cannot reach the required temperature,” Imboywa said. In fact the material can remain infectious because they may not reach the required temperatures.
Devolution could make it worse
As more hospitals come up in tandem with the growing population, a rethinking how medical waste is handled will be inevitable. The devolution of resources has seen more clinics and dispensaries put up in previously unreached areas. But the resources are so limited to put up waste disposal facilities such as incinerators.
Besides being expensive, Dr Runyenje agrees that even if these facilities were to put up their own incinerators, there would be more pollution and authorities will have more difficulty supervising them.
“There is need to pool incineration facilities for medical and hazardous waste,” he says. These centres can serve as emission monitoring points for authorities. “It will then be easier to put controls from such a central facility. “At the Technical Working Group, we are looking at how counties can pool their facilities together and have their medical waste incinerated at a central point. It will be very expensive in the long run to have every facility to have its own incinerator that cannot run at full capacity,” he says.
The best waste disposal method is controlled tipping being practiced in most of Europe and North America where it is buried in layers, Dr Runyenje says. “The advantage with this method is that the land can still be used for other activities. It is the only assurance of disposal of any form of waste,” he says.
Kariobangi, which now hosts light industries, used to be a controlled tipping site before open dumping at Dandora. “Counties should be thinking of controlled tipping instead of investing heavily in incinerators,” he says.
General waste can have many recyclable materials but proper segregation which can make this possible is still lacking in the country.
The effectiveness of recycling is determined by the effectiveness of segregation.
The problem, according to Kinoti, is enforcement of the law. While bigger hospitals are trying to properly dispose of their waste, some smaller clinics may be spoiling it, she says. The fact that generators cannot monitor their waste once it is given to waste collectors is also another problem according to her.
“There are many quacks doing waste management mixing household waste with hazardous waste. This can pose a serious health problem,” says Kinoti. Since they empty waste bins from homes, waste collectors can cause serious contamination in households. “Waste collectors who are collecting hazardous waste should be dedicated waste handlers and should not handle other general waste,” Kinoti says.
Effluent from the scrubber system should be taken for treatment to remove heavy metals and other pollutants. But the sewerage system is broken and a lot is discharged on the way. Sewage pipes are sometimes deliberately punctured and effluent used as fertiliser for crops.
“The law on sound medical waste disposal should be enforced, district and healthcare centres should install larger incinerators to handle waste from smaller fee. We should have dedicated healthcare waste managers,” Kinoti says.
incinerators to install on the island of Aruba
incinerators to install on the island of Aruba.
the island does not have medical waste & other waste incinerators.
we are in the process of exploring the feasabilty and setting up an incinerator facility
on the island of Aruba.
this is an island of 120.000 habitants.
we have 2 hospitals,more then 20 dentist offices,and over 50 doctor offices.
would it be possible to give us info on the capacity of incinerator we need
on this island.
CPASA success: Up in smoke
CPASA (Community Partners Against Substance Abuse) Director Dawn Conerton was thrilled to announce the new purchase.
She confirmed the organization was able to use money from its reserves to help with the purchase. However, CPASA is still looking for donations to help make up the cost and also to help with the upkeep of equipment.
The incinerator is located at the Princeton Police Department. A fence and a shelter still needs to be built around the incinerator before it’s used.
As previously reported in the BCR and the Putnam County Record, the state made the decision to no longer dispose of prescription drugs, forcing CPASA to look into the purchase of an incinerator to continue its program, which allows residents to dispose of their unused prescription medications in a safe manner.
The cost of the incinerator came to around $10,000.
Since CPASA’s formation in July 2010, it has worked to keep unused prescription drugs off the street. Since September 2014, the program has collected and disposed of about 7,235 pounds of drugs.
Conerton explained how CPASA has worked hard to get the incinerator to help maintain the P2D2 program.
She said with the incinerator, CPASA will be able to continue educating the public about the safe way to dispose of drugs and remind them not to flush medication into the water supply.
“It hurts the water supply, and we also are getting them out of cupboards to prevent them from getting into the wrong hands,” she said. “We now have a way to actually dispose of them completely.”
With the incinerator, CPASA now plans to host more collection days to help get rid of even more unused medications.
Princeton Police Chief Tom Root was also thrilled with the arrival of the incinerator. He explained the incinerator can get up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and takes about 20 minutes to burn down the material. The drugs are burned down to a fine powder, which is bagged and taken to the landfill.
The incinerator arrived at about the right time, as Root said there is currently about 1,500 pounds of pills to dispose of from the Bureau and Putnam counties area.
Root said CPASA plans to charge a fee to communities who don’t provide a donation for the incinerator. The fees will help maintain the incinerator and help keep up with the purchase of diesel fuel.
CPASA is still looking for donations to help make up for the cost of the incinerator and to help continue the work CPASA does throughout the year.
“CPASA appreciates all the donations. We would never have believed in such a short amount of time this would be a reality,” Conerton said. “This community is so awesome with their support and knowing how important it was to help. It’s widespread and something that’s going to help everyone.”
CPASA is also hosting a fundraiser on Saturday, Aug. 1, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. in Zearing Park. More details to come on the event.
information from: http://www.bcrnews.com/2015/07/10/cpasa-success-up-in-smoke/azhjtuw/
Louisiana refuses Ebola incineration waste
On October 13, 2014, Louisiana District Judge Bob Downing granted the Louisiana attorney general’s request for injunctive
relief against “potentially Ebola-contaminated material” collected from the Dallas, Texas, Ebola victim’s apartment.
The waste, contained within 142 55-gallon plastic drums, was first transported from the Dallas apartment to a Port Arthur
incinerator under a Department of Transportation (“DOT”) emergency special permit. From there, the ash residue was
scheduled to be transported to Calcasieu, Louisiana, for disposal. However, the landfill announced that it would not
accept the waste in a non-binding statement. The Louisiana attorney general followed up this announcement with a request
for a Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) to stop that waste from crossing the border into Louisiana.
The CDC, through its August 2014 guidance “Infection Prevention and Control Recommendations for Hospitalized Patients
with Known or Suspected Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever in U.S. Hospitals,” recommends that all Ebola-contaminated or potentially
contaminated materials be placed in leak- proof, rigid waste containment and sent for incineration or autoclaving in
accordance with DOT Hazardous Materials Regulations and DOT guidance. Of concern to the Louisiana attorney general, there
is no CDC post-incineration testing. In fact, the CDC in a letter to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals
stated that “Ebola-associated waste that has been appropriately inactivated or incinerated is no longer infectious,”
without any references in support of the statement. EPA has also declined to regulate, indicating that medical waste
disposal is primarily regulated by the states. DOT indicated that the CDC and DOT plan to issue joint guidance regarding
disposal sometime next week. After reviewing these facts, the Louisiana District Judge granted the TRO, effectively
stopping the ash residue in its tracks in Texas.
The Texas hazardous waste incinerator and transporter are likely now actively seeking out alternative Type I or II
landfills to accept the waste. In the meantime, the CDC may also step up to verify and confirm the safety of the medical
waste post-incineration to ease the fears of other states, before they too shut their doors.
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Manual load twin chamber incinerator for medical waste to burn 50kg/hr on continuous operation, with Primary temperature in the region of 800degC minimum and 1200degC or more in the Secondary chamber, complete with charging door, Ash door, Air and view ports, auxiliary air system with adjustable dampers, burners and burner control system and ignition unit, the whole to meet NEMA requirements and other international standards.
Baltimore teens take out the trash
Youth battle a waste incinerator.
It’s the threat of dangerous air pollution that has students at Curtis Bay’s Benjamin Franklin High School leaving the classroom and demonstrating in the streets of Baltimore.
In Curtis Bay, a neglected waterfront neighborhood at the southwestern fringes of Baltimore, an alliance of environmental activists and neighborhood groups—including an energetic and creative band of high school students—has succeeded in holding off the construction of an enormous trash incinerator project.
The students wowed members of the Baltimore Board of Education this May with a presentation that mixed carefully researched environmental and public health analysis with a hip-hop routine that had board members up on their feet. Greg Sawtell, an organizer with Baltimore-based United Workers (one of several organizations allied against the incinerator), says conversations with school board members since then have left him optimistic that they will oppose the project.
Even though preparation work on the incinerator began last year, full-scale construction is stalled, and the projected completion date has been pushed to 2016 from an initial estimate of 2013. Opponents are reluctant to claim sole credit for the delays, as there have also been financing and regulatory issues, but believe their efforts are sharpening scrutiny and slowing progress.
Talk of the so-called trash-to-energy incinerator plant began some five years ago, after chemical manufacturer FMC Corp closed a pesticide plant, eliminating 130 jobs (including 71 union jobs with the United Steelworkers) and leaving vacant a large parcel of land zoned for heavy industry. The site straddles the Curtis Bay and Fairfield neighborhoods of the city, parts of which have large African-American populations. To many political and community leaders in this deindustrialized and job-starved section of the city—which lies far from the famed Inner Harbor or Fells Point entertainment districts—it seemed like a boon when Energy Answers Inc., an Albany, New York-based power development company, appeared on the scene to propose a plant that would burn commercial and construction waste to produce electricity. Energy Answers billed the plant as a way to restore up to 200 jobs and provide clean, low-cost energy. The proposal came with enthusiastic endorsements from local political leaders, especially Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and city Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.
Initially, Energy Answers struggled to find loans and missed a deadline to secure federal stimulus money. But in May 2011, the project got a big boost when O’Malley signed legislation to help make the plant profitable through a complicated pollution credits scheme that would funnel cash to Energy Answers for generating so-called clean power. (A few days later, Energy Answers gave $100,000 in campaign contributions to the Democratic Governors Association, chaired by O’Malley.)
But for locals, the bloom was already coming off the rose. It had emerged that an estimated 400 to 600 exhaust-spewing trucks carrying waste tires, metals, plastics and construction materials would travel through the streets of Curtis Bay every day to feed the plant. The incinerator itself would burn up to 4,000 tons of waste a day for decades— raising even more alarming public health concerns. In a recent Baltimore Sun op-ed urging cancellation of the project, Gwen DuBois, of Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility, said the plant could emit dioxin, mercury and other heavy metals, which can cause cancer and other diseases.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is just how dirty these plants really are,” says Mike Ewall, founder and co-director of Energy Justice Network, a national organization devoted to helping communities fight dirty energy development. “They are much worse than coal or anything else. And this would be the biggest such plant in the country.” Curtis Bay is already the most polluted zip code in Maryland, Ewall notes, adding that low-income neighborhoods of color are often used as dumping grounds precisely because they lack the political power to fight back.
It’s the threat of dangerous air pollution that has students at Curtis Bay’s Benjamin Franklin High School leaving the classroom and demonstrating in the streets of Baltimore. In their largest action, in late 2013, more than 100 protesters marched from the school to the site of the proposed incinerator—just a mile away. A related petition has garnered more than 2,000 signatures.
Recent Benjamin Franklin graduate Audrey Rozier is a leader of Free Your Voice, the student group agitating to stop the incinerator, as well as the co-author of a rap song devoted to the campaign. “We have our rights according to the amendments / But why do we feel like we’ve been so resented / Ignored, shoved to the side where opinions don’t matter,” goes one verse.
Rozier says the song, which she has performed all over the city, has helped educate the local community and a broader Baltimore audience. “What was amazing to me in the beginning was that people outside the community were going to [build the incinerator], but the people who live here didn’t know anything about it,” she says. “I think that’s changed.”
That disconnect between the political elite and the communities most affected by its decisions is at the heart of the fight over the Curtis Bay incinerator, says Sawtell. In Baltimore and elsewhere, decisions on economic development policies are made by a political and economic elite with little or no input from the working-class residents who must live day-to-day with the consequences. “Community members we’ve talked to say no one asked their opinion before the project was announced,” says Sawtell. “Somehow I think if it was the children of Gov. O’Malley, or the children of Mayor Rawlings-Blake, who were going to be poisoned, the decision would be different.”
The campaign is drawing increasing support, most recently from the nearby Anne Arundel County chapter of the NAACP. Meanwhile, enthusiasm for the plant among politicians seems to have cooled in the face of the protests, Sawtell says, with near-silence on the issue from Mayor Rawlings-Blake in the past few years. The Democratic candidate for governor in this year’s election, Anthony Brown, declined to take a position.
If the construction delays are any indication, even Energy Answers may be losing interest, although the company tells In These Times it’s in “confidential discussions for waste and energy sales” and plans to proceed with the project. Sawtell, however, believes that a major push from opponents now could kill the plan once and for all.
by: http://www.radiofree.org/us/baltimore-teens-take-out-the-trash/