Victory for Monitoring Toxic Incinerator Pollution!

In Ore­gon, Sen­ate Bill 488, a prece­dent-set­ting bill to con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor tox­ic emis­sions from waste incin­er­a­tion, passed into law with the gov­er­nor’s sig­na­ture on August 4, 2023. See the lat­est news cov­er­age in Waste Dive (8/3/2023): Ore­gon becomes first state to require con­tin­u­ous emis­sions mon­i­tor­ing at incin­er­a­tors.

The law requires the state’s only trash incin­er­a­tor (Cov­an­ta Mar­i­on) to have to con­tin­u­ous­ly mon­i­tor for dioxins/furans, PCBs, and tox­ic met­als for 12 months. They’d be the first in the nation to have to use this mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, and it’ll like­ly expose that actu­al tox­ic air emis­sions are far high­er than what is shown by once-per-year self-admin­is­tered “best behav­ior” tests. Con­tin­u­ous test­ing at incin­er­a­tors in Europe has shown that diox­ins, the most tox­ic chem­i­cals known to sci­ence, are emit­ted at rates 32 to 1,290 times high­er than we think they are in the U.S. when we test just once a year.

This will have nation­al impli­ca­tions once that data comes out. It’s the first time these tox­ic chem­i­cals will be test­ed con­tin­u­ous­ly in the U.S., and should put to rest the claims that the test­ing tech­nol­o­gy is not available.

This hard-won vic­to­ry could not have hap­pened with­out the work of our mem­ber groups, Beyond Tox­i­cs and the Clean Air Now Coali­tion. Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work has been work­ing with them since 2019 to close the Cov­an­ta Mar­i­on waste incin­er­a­tor, burn­ing trash, med­ical, and indus­tri­al wastes in the large­ly Lat­inx com­mu­ni­ty of Brooks, just north of Salem.

Requir­ing con­tin­u­ous emis­sions mon­i­tor­ing is one of the key strate­gies we’ve been using to pre­vent air pol­lut­ing indus­tries with local ordi­nances and to hold exist­ing ones account­able. It’s one of the key points we raised in a 274-group strong Octo­ber 2022 let­ter to the White House Coun­cil on Envi­ron­men­tal Qual­i­ty about EPA’s bad poli­cies relat­ing to waste incineration.

If we reg­u­lat­ed motorists the way we do most pol­lu­tants from smoke­stacks, it would be akin to enforc­ing a speed lim­it by allow­ing dri­vers to dri­ve all year with no speedome­ter. Once a year, a speed trap would be set on the high­way with signs warn­ing “slow down… speed trap ahead,” and the dri­ver’s broth­er would be run­ning the speed trap (com­pa­nies choose who they pay to con­duct the test).

For near­ly every­thing with a smoke­stack in the U.S., con­tin­u­ous mon­i­tor­ing is only used for three pol­lu­tants, and none of the tox­ic ones. As we change this real­i­ty and find that we’re exposed to far more than we real­ize, it could be a game chang­er for get­ting these tox­ic indus­tries closed for good.