The new alchemy of garbage: turning it to gold, energy, or toxins?

No one likes trash landfills. They often smell bad, attract pests, and leak toxins into the environment. To reduce the need for such unwanted facilities, the Sierra Club has long supported waste reduction, reuse, materials recovery, and composting, and has opposed trash incineration because of its adverse effects on our air, water, and health.

Now some companies and government officials are once again touting technological solutions to California's solid-waste problems. These advocates claim that what they call "conversion technologies" can keep our garbage out of landfills and turn it into useful products. Clearly, anyone who could turn trash into gold would become as popular as medieval alchemists. But, as Californians Against Waste puts it, "Conversion Technologies (CT) is an unfortunate euphemism that refers to an unconstructively broad spectrum of real and theoretical waste management technologies that range from relatively benign organics composting-like facilities to environmentally dangerous and economically dubious incinerator-like facilities that `cook' garbage at temperatures up to 7,000º F and have been found to produce dioxins, [some] of the most carcinogenic substances known to humankind."

Indeed, controversy has surrounded the high-heat technologies, such as gasification, pyrolysis, and plasma arc, because of concerns that their emissions will pose the same kind of health threats as those created by solid-waste incinerators, including the emission of toxins that cause cancer and reproductive and developmental damage. For this reason, community groups have opposed a number of facilities that would "cook" garbage and convert it into saleable commodities such as electricity and liquid transportation fuels. Recycling advocates have also expressed concerns that development of large, expensive trash-cooking facilities would detract from ongoing efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle ("the three R's") more of California's solid waste.

Sierra Club California has kept an open mind to the possibility that new technologies could reduce the need for landfills, but we insist that these technologies not emit poison into our air or water and not interfere with the three R's. During the three-plus years that the issue has been debated in the legislature, our mantra has been "show us the emissions data." Without credible verifiable real-world data on the effects on our air and water, we can not support any policies that would favor or subsidize such plants. Although the companies selling the products have often promised such evidence imminently, they have yet to actually present it.

Despite the lack of any credible assurance that the garbage-cookers would be as clean as promised, California's Integrated Waste Management Board has advocated policies that would promote them. The legislature, fortunately, has taken a more cautious approach. This year, the Assembly's Natural Resources Committee put on hold Assembly Bill 1090, which would have made conversion technology a waste-management priority and given local governments recycling credit for cooking their trash. The committee, chaired by environmental champion Loni Hancock (Democrat - Berkeley), decided to learn more about the ramifications of such a policy change by holding an additional information hearing this fall.

Bill Magavern, senior representative, Sierra Club California