Non-government organizations in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand today spurned a trade delegation from the United Kingdom visiting Southeast Asia this week to market waste management capabilities which include unsustainable and harmful waste management practices such as incineration(1).

In a letter sent to UK ambassadors in the three countries, the NGOs Consumers' Association of Penang and Sahabat Alam (Malaysia), Ecological Waste Coalition, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, and Health Care Without Harm (Philippines), Campaign for Alternative Industry Network (Thailand), and Greenpeace Southeast Asia, rejected the centralized, capital-intensive, and unsustainable end-of-pipe waste management technologies, such as incinerators and landfills, being promoted by the delegation.

“This trade mission is selling pollution,” said Greenpeace Southeast Asia Toxics Campaigner Ms. Beau Baconguis, “but the people in this region are not buying it.”

“Communities, whether in Southeast Asia or elsewhere in the world, should not be obliged to put up with polluting technologies,” she added.

Incinerators and similar technologies pose serious threats to the environment and community health. Depending on what materials are burned and the operating conditions, toxic by-products, such as dioxins and other persistent organic pollutants (POPs), mercury and other heavy metals, particulate matters, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen chloride, as well as waste water and ash or char residues, are released(2).

Instead of exporting unsound waste management practices to developing countries, industrialized nations like the UK should support and promote resource-conserving community enterprises and programs that will maximize recycling of resources, generate jobs, develop local economies and prevent harm to the environment and people's health.

“The solution to the waste problem must be a holistic, environmentally sustainable, socially-just, and community-driven approach that will reduce both the volume and toxicity of materials used and discarded, and scale up waste prevention, segregation at source, recycling and composting programs,” explained Consumers’ Association of Penang and Sahabat Alam Malaysia President Mr. S.M. Idris.

“Incinerators and landfills are no remedies to our wasteful practices. These back-end interventions only encourage nonstop wasting and obstruct innovative and winning practices of progressing towards Zero Waste,” added Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives Co-Coordinator Mr. Manny C. Calonzo.

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(1) The trade mission is organized by the Environmental Industries Sector Unit of the UK Trade and Investments is in Southeast Asia this week to market waste management capabilities, which include waste-to-energy technologies among others.
(2) waste incineration, including gasification and the related technologies of pyrolysis and plasma arc, infringes on the spirit of the Stockholm Convention on POPs2 which recognizes the threat of these chemicals to public health and environment. The Convention aims to “minimize with the ultimate goal of elimination” 12 priority chemical pollutants, four of which are by-products of incineration (dioxins, furans, hexachlorobenzene and polychlorinated byphenyls.). The notoriously toxic dioxins have been linked to cancers, immune system dysfunctions, birth defects, reproductive and developmental disorders, and other health problems.

visit:  http://www.no-burn.org/