Britain produces 29 million tonnes of municipal waste a year, and the Local Government Association says it costs between £80 and £100 to dispose of each tonne. This loss of resources means that more forests are cut down, more mines are driven into fragile habitats, more oil is used to make plastic that is thrown away. Pollutants from landfill, including dioxins, create toxic conditions in water courses, while the pollution from transporting the rubbish is another environmental ill. Methane emitted by decaying waste is a major greenhouse gas, and although it disappears more rapidly from the atmosphere, it is around 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.

Waste of money

The EU Landfill Directive means that each local authority must reduce the amount of biodegradable waste that is put in landfill by 75 per cent of the 1998 figure by 2010, then a further 50 per cent by 2013 and another 35 per cent by 2020. Authorities that miss the first target will be fined £7 million each, and a recent report by the Audit Commission has urged local councils to build incinerators to avoid the risk of such fines. But even without the prospect of fines, the practice of landfill is costly.

Landfill tax is £32 a tonne at present and due to increase to £48 by 2010. So incineration has been put forward to fill the gap, repackaged as a ‘green’ way of producing energy from burning waste and avoiding the pollution associated with landfill. However much we recycle, it is argued by the pro-burning lobby, some waste will always be left over. EU policy, to its credit, is firmly anti-dumping, but is burning the solution?

Incinerators take years to build and can cost hundreds of millions of pounds. They are generally funded by private finance initiative (PFI) schemes. Many such projects have risen sharply in cost with the ongoing financial crisis, and local authorities are finding it difficult to borrow the money from banks to complete them. A £4.4 billion PFI project in Manchester, for example, is currently in crisis because the private companies behind the scheme are short of a couple of hundred million.

Local authorities are signing long-term contracts – as long as 25 years – with the incinerator projects, with the paradoxical outcome that they have to keep on feeding them waste. If the amount of rubbish is reduced the incinerators will lack financial viability, so incinerator building locks us into a system that is based not on reducing waste but producing more. This is one reason why Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London and London’s Green Party MEP Jean Lambert campaigned so vigorously against the expansion of incinerator projects in the capital.

Health hazards

Health effects are also a very serious worry. While modern incinerators are less likely to produce dioxins if properly run, there is much evidence to suggest that they are not always run with enough care. The incinerator operators in Edmonton, north London, have been fined for breaching health and safety legislation. Without very careful monitoring, a new generation of incinerators is likely to commit similar breaches on a national scale. Dioxins have traditionally been a worry, but the major concern now is about mb-10 particles. Although these are unknown to most people – even those active in the Green Party or environmental movements – they have the potential to create a health crisis.

I first became seriously concerned about mb-10s after reading Bjorn Lomborg’s book The Sceptical Environmentalist. Lomborg is famously critical of claims made by environmentalists and views market-based economic growth as creating an ever-cleaner planet. Yet in his chapter on air pollution, he notes the ill effects of mb-10s. If even a sceptic like him is worried, the rest of us should be terrified.

Mb-10s are tiny microscopic particles produced by incinerators, difficult to monitor because they are so small, and many experts view them as deadly. Their size means they have the potential to get into the human body and do real damage, and we know that incinerators can spread these particles over a 15-mile radius. Several reports note increases in health problems, including genetic defects, among people who live close to incinerators. Incinerators have also been linked to increased infant mortality, heart disease and cancer. The ash left over from incineration is toxic and risks being blown around during disposal.

So incinerators are costly, damage the environment and health and produce far less energy than they promise. But there is a huge incinerator lobby in the UK that has the ear of government and major political parties. Waste has been big business in the UK ever since Thatcher launched her crusade to privatise local authority services in the 1980s. The name badges for delegates at the last Conservative Party conference were stamped with the logo of Sita, one of Britain’s biggest waste companies, which has an interest in incinerators.

In the Morning Star (26 October 2008), Solomon Hughes noted: ‘The company’s name runs all around the lanyards, so Tory delegates’ necks will be “branded” Sita. This is embarrassing for Conservative shadow Cornwall minister Mark Prisk and Conservative candidate for St Austell and Newquay Caroline Righton. Last month, they jointly presented a petition to Gordon Brown against a Cornish waste incinerator being built by Sita.’

And it’s not just the Tories. The t-shirts worn by the stewards at Labour’s Manchester conference were also marked with the Sita logo, and the company paid £30,000 for ‘advice’ to former Labour chief whip Hilary Armstrong. But Sita is not unique. Waste is big business – and there is no profit in no waste. Like virtually all other areas of British policy making, the agenda is shaped largely behind closed doors by corporate interests. Ultimately, capitalism thrives on waste: the more we throw away, and the faster we buy replacements, the better.

Zero waste

There is an alternative. Local campaigns can defeat incineration. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have been fighting the incinerator menace for more than a decade. There is a national anti-incineration network that is bringing grassroots campaigners together. The Green Party, along with Ken Livingstone, has a proud history of fighting incinerators. The Socialist Party is currently running an impressive campaign against a new north London waste plan based on burning. Social movements can win if they make noise, start fighting early, use legal means and embarrass councillors who support the toxic incinerator alternative. There are a number of very useful research, campaigning and legal resources that activists can use (see box).

The alternative to landfill and incineration is zero waste. Why recycle when goods can be made to last longer and be repaired more easily, and over-packaging can be outlawed? Zero waste is about producing less waste in the first place. In San Francisco the Green Party has managed to ban traditional plastic bags. EU directives are already making corporations deal with the consequences of waste, although the British government often opposes such progressive moves.

There are a number of clean technologies for dealing with the waste we throw away. A Greenpeace report on the subject, Zero Waste, argues that kerbside collection could be extended to the whole of Britain to make it easier to recycle where appropriate. Something like 45 per cent of the waste we produce domestically is from food, which is shocking in itself – and, given that decaying food produces methane, it is also a source of climate change. Food waste could be collected in sealed units and be put through anaerobic digesters to be used as a source of energy.

The right kind of waste policy could contribute massively to a low-carbon economy. It will require a political struggle, but without real pressure we could easily slip into a Britain where most of our waste is incinerated, with devastating financial, environmental and health consequences. n

Useful links

Socialist Party report on incinerators http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/519/3740
Greenpeace incinerator resources

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/tags/incineration?page=6

Friends of the Earth resources

http://community.foe.co.uk/campaigns/waste/incineration

UK anti-incinerator network

http://www.ukwin.org.uk

Medical report on incinerators

http://www.ecomed.org.uk/pub_waste.php

The Chinese government’s anti-pollution initiatives look good on paper but lose potency and are rarely implemented once filtered down through the various bureaucracies to the local level. International agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol have no traction as China believes its status as a developing economy exempts it from being bound by regulatory agreements. Business, with its short-term, profit-oriented focus, cannot be counted on. The damage to China’s environment is getting worse and worse.

According to many, hope lies with ‘civil society’, led by a new breed of non -governmental organisations (NGOs) that are already campaigning to reform Chinese environmental practices.

Reaching out

The very concept of an NGO seems to contradict China’s governmental structure: an authoritarian state ruled by a communist party. However, as the government wakes up to a massive environmental crisis and the prospects of associated economic losses, it is reaching out for anything that can help. In this case it is granting tacit acceptance, or even direct endorsement, of NGOs.

In 1994 the Chinese government passed regulations that for the first time granted legal status to independent NGOs. Environmental groups were the first to register and now form the largest sector of civil society groups in China. There are more than 3,300 Chinese NGOs in operation, among them Friends of Nature and Global Village Beijing. Additionally, many international NGOs such as Greenpeace, WWF and the Natural Resources Defense Council have set up offices in China’s big cities.

However, even as environmental NGOs increase in visibility and influence, the government still has considerable latitude to determine their fate. NGOs are watched carefully and heavily regulated – their role circumscribed by political sensitivities and a heavy-handed big brother. A government sponsor must be procured as a prerequisite to legal registration – necessary before an NGO is able to operate inside the
country.

This can be tricky. If an NGO is considered politically charged or capable of doing work outside the narrow and specific environmental campaigns assigned to it, its leaders will have difficulty finding a sponsor. Likewise, if a government-sponsored NGO takes actions that are perceived as provocative or outside its mandate, then its sponsorship can be terminated and it can be shut down instantly. To avoid this difficulty, many NGOs register as for-profit organisations.

Even then, funding remains a problem. Regulations state that NGOs cannot have donor members. Financial support from the central government is often insufficient and the culture of philanthropy is yet to develop, mostly because there are simply no old-moneyed Rockefeller types in China. As a result, NGOs turn to whatever sources they can – sometimes forcing them to accept funds from multinational corporations
that are themselves big polluters. In the process, they sacrifice their ability to sink teeth into the corporate world. For example, Friends of the Earth and Global Village Beijing have accepted money from Royal Dutch Shell and Dupont.

‘Typically, they [NGOs] avoid confrontational methods and adopt approaches that encourage learning, co-operation and participation,’ says Yang Goubin, associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Friends of the Earth spokesperson Mei Ng agrees that a wide spectrum of values need to be addressed as a means to avoid confrontation: ‘The best way to engage China is not just to go in there saying ‘I am green, I am a green NGO’ … If you go in with the goal of reducing poverty, helping with literacy problems, helping women’s health, helping productive health, and at the same time sewing the seed of environmental protection, ecological protection and sustainability, then you are seen not to be pointing a finger at the bad environmental record, but as coming to help the poor, help the deprived, and at the same time, help the environment.’

NGOs and the government

Why would an authoritarian government want to allow NGOs to exist?
As China’s government structure becomes increasingly decentralised and the power of authority and decision-making is handed down from the central government to the provincial levels, local protectionism, corruption and unenforced central government policies have become major issues. NGOs compensate for the central government’s diminished ability to oversee and manage local-level activity.

Thus, NGOs serve as the eyes and ears of government. ‘China is very concerned about instability due to public unrest,’ says Mei Ng. Incidents of public unrest due to pollution rose by 20 per cent in 2005/06, according to official figures. ‘They are facing a time bomb,’ she says. ‘China knows that to defuse this time bomb, it is very important to involve the public.’ So the government allows NGOs to operate but keeps them on a tight leash. In this way, NGOs are sometimes able to win protection and status through their closeness with the government.

NGOs are limited to three functions. First, they organise clean-up campaigns. This is very helpful to the government, because it relieves the party of the burden of this messy and sometimes labour-intensive task. NGOs are better at getting volunteers. No- one would work for the government for free, but giving time to a NGO makes people feel like they are part of an altruistic elite. When a pollution disaster breaks, the media coverage of volunteers diligently working away to clean up the mess looks good for the government. It makes it appear that they are taking the problem seriously, thus calming concerned citizens and making it less likely that they will take to the streets.

Second, NGOs raise public awareness. So far, ‘awareness’ doesn’t depart from consumer-based conservation campaigns. The Environmental Friends Association for Public Welfare and the Green Volunteer League publish materials, which advise: ‘People should avoid random purchasing and should not purchase based on desire.’ This type of activism runs the risk of sounding like a thinly-veiled Mao-style austerity campaign, which might have a hard time in a country where many people have newly-earned cash burning in their pockets. The idea is that climate change and pollution are a result of the people’s consumption patterns, not of an unsustainable government-led growth strategy.

The awareness campaigns are geared toward the wealthiest class with hopes that it will trickle down. ‘Rich people are the first to buy things like environmentally friendly houses and electric cars. Then it will become more affordable for other, less wealthy people,’ says Sun Liping of the Green China Consumer Union.

Third, NGOs serve an important financial role. They are able to devote more resources to international fundraising and can accept money from organisations that won’t work directly with the Chinese government. There are political considerations here, too: NGOs can ask for donations but the government could never do that for fear of ‘losing face’.

In effect, the Communist Party outsources much of the environmental burden to NGOs. NGOs are adept at detecting and surfacing pollution-related incidents of unrest that may be threatening to the government. As such, NGO campaigns are limited to reactions to already existing pollution and there are little or no opportunities to pre-empt environmental degradation or to lobby for more effective environmental laws.

On one of my last days in Beijing I went to Tsinghua University to meet
with Dan Guttman, currently a visiting professor at Tsinghua University. We sat in the basement of the School of Public Management and had coffee at a small café. When I told him I was writing a story about political participation and NGOs in China, he looked at me incredulously. ‘China is still a government-focused society,’ he said. ‘Not in the western parlance, a civil society-focused society. In this setting, NGOs are often organisations attached to the government – non-profit organisations but not non-governmental organisations.’

If this is true, it is possible that no one will save the world from China’s pollution.

It was during the 1980s that the cellular phone first came to our attention – remember the images of yuppies flaunting phones the size of car batteries – and in the years since they have become the most common personal accessory since the wristwatch.

The industry is dominated by a small number of very powerful global players, with Nokia and Motorola accounting for nearly 60 per cent of the global market, and SonyEricsson, Samsung, and LG Electronics controlling around 20 per cent. Despite many of its markets reaching saturation point – over 90 per cent of western Europeans have access to a mobile phone – the industry grew by a remarkable 24.7 per cent in 2006, shipping more than a billion handsets globally.

In November last year, the Dutch-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), published The High Cost of Calling. This in-depth report clearly shows that as a relatively new industry, mobile phone manufacturers rely on the same discredited practices as their counterparts in longer-established sectors.

In the countries where most of the world’s mobile telephones are manufactured, China, India, Thailand, and the Philippines, the depressingly familiar case studies include the use of child labour, compulsory unpaid overtime for ‘unskilled’ workers, no legal right for workers to organise or strike, and horrific breaches of the most basic health and safety standards.

Perhaps the worst example of the latter was discovered at a mobile phone lens production facility, Hivac Startech Film Window (Shenzhen), where lenses for the cameras on Motorola’s phones were produced. Ventilation in the plant was rarely utilised despite the range of chemicals used in the manufacturing process and nine workers were hospitalised with poisoning. One of the workers affected was forced to terminate her pregnancy on doctor’s advice; a termination that could have been avoided had the company dealt with the issue when workers first raised it more than six months earlier.

Motorola had little choice but to investigate the matter and eventually accepted that not only had the poisoning taken place but that it was as a result of their supplier’s practices.

‘Hivac is just one factory amongst thousands,’ says Joseph Wilde, one of the report’s coauthors. ‘And Motorola’s response is symptomatic of the very ad hoc approach the mobile phone manufacturers have to dealing with these issues.’

Wilde is frustrated that although the companies involved claim to have investigated and improved the issues raised in the report, they have refused to involve local independent stakeholders in the development or monitoring of corrective actions and are unwilling to provide any documentation or evidence as to what has really been done.

‘There is a need for structural changes in policy and practices in the industry, particularly in how companies deal with selecting and monitoring suppliers from which they procure mobile phone components,’ he says. ‘Their focus is heavily weighted towards price and quality and not enough attention is being paid to social and environmental factors.’

Needless to say, SOMO’s recommendations for an industrywide strategy to eliminate disreputable practices have fallen on deaf ears. It is a situation that Jim Puckett, co-ordinator of the Basel Action Network (BAN), can empathise with.

BAN faced a brick wall from the industry’s lead body, CTIA, the International Association for the Wireless Technology Industry, when the group argued that exporting mobiles from saturated markets to poorer countries for parts was the equivalent of exporting hazardous waste. As such, BAN argued, it should be subject to the controls of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal.

‘The cell phone industry lobbied very hard for exemptions from the established rules governing global trade in toxic waste,’ says Puckett. ‘It became clear that the grand design of many of the mobile phone carriers was to transfer the cell phone disposal problem to developing countries, even in contravention of international law.’

The industry has also been under attack for its sourcing of materials. A 2004 report by the Ethical Consumer’s online guide, ethiscore.org, slated mobile phone manufacturers for sourcing coltan, an integral ingredient in the manufacture of mobile phone, from warlords in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as for their universal connections to the arms industry.

It is clear that there’s much more to mobile phone manufacturers than the friendly facilitators of communication they like to paint themselves as.

Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO)

Basel Action Network

Ethical Consumer magazine\’s online shopping guide

“That message should be taken into account when international leaders seek consensus on the contentious issue of ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming,” says Victor Borja, an award-winning research scientist at the federal government Health Secretariat and co-author of a study into the problem. The Kyoto Protocol featured prominently in discussions to devise an implementation plan for the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg earlier this year.

Controlling greenhouse gases will “diminish the risk of respiratory or acute cardiovascular illnesses for people in areas where pollutants are most directly emitted, as well as improving their quality of life,” Borja explains.

He is part of a huge interdisciplinary team working on the Integrated Programme on Urban, Regional and Global Air Pollution, which was initiated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, in 1999 by chemists Luisa T. Molina and Mario Molina, a Mexico City native and Nobel laureate.

It was this team’s research on Mexico City that provided the scientific basis for Proaire III – constituting an expansion on two previous short-term Proaires. Proaire III calls for $14.7 billion of approximately equal parts of public and private investment in 89 projects to achieve reductions of 18 per cent in suspended particulates produced from car fuel, 16 per cent in sulphur dioxide, 26 per cent in carbon monoxide, 43 per cent in nitrogen dioxide and 17 per cent in hydrocarbons.

“Reduction of 10 per cent in particulates alone could lower the number of premature deaths in the metropolitan area by 2,000 a year,” Mario Molina estimates. Children are among the heaviest sufferers of air pollution. Antonio Estrada Garduña, an 11-year-old asthma sufferer, learned at an early age how to vomit the phlegm that blocks his respiratory tubes when greenhouse gases in the local smog trigger an allergic reaction. His coughing bouts strike terror in his mother.

“It’s not a normal fear. It’s a really big fear that one has,” says Rosa María Garduna. “One can die from asphyxiation, get pneumonia, or drown trying to stick out their tongue.” Sufferers like Antonio could benefit from the government programme: achieving compliance with federal air quality standards for particulates and ozone will generate up to $4 billion worth of benefits annually in avoided deaths, illnesses, lost-time at work and associated expenses, Borja says.

“Human health has been the centre of these measures,” declared State of Mexico Ecology Secretary Martha Hilda Gonzalez, acting president of the Metropolitan Environmental Commission, in announcing Proaire III. Half the measures are for improvements in transport, including replacing a fleet of about 30,000 old, smoke-belching micro-buses with new, larger buses using cleaner fuel. Proaire has asked the national oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) to make available low-sulphur gasoline and diesel by 2006.

The programme also calls for the valley’s 35,000 industrial and power plants to improve their efficiency and burn less polluting materials such as natural gas. It recommends adoption of local zoning regulations, control of squatter settlements, natural resource conservation and environmental education in schools.

Borja and the other researchers from various countries who developed the scientific underpinning for the plan intend for it to serve as a global model. “What we learn here we can apply certainly to other developing countries, but also even perhaps in the United States or Europe,” Molina says.

Perhaps the first lesson is that even a scientifically-based air quality management programme will not work without political and administrative mechanisms. “Everything Molina is proposing was proposed 15 years ago,” says Ivan Restrepo, director of the nonprofit Center for Eco-Development. “What we need is political decisions, which have not been made.” For example, limits on particulates and ozone were established but never enforced.

The three levels of government (city, state and federal) involved in the Metropolitan Environmental Commission, each administered by a different political party, have trouble cooperating. They have failed to act on the Molina team’s preliminary recommendations to overcome this problem by making the commission independent – with its own budget, staff and rules – and by increasing stakeholder participation. The commission’s instructions are falling on deaf ears.

Environment Secretary Claudia Sheinbaum has slammed the federal treasury department for failing to reinstitute a fuel tax that Proaire stipulates for funding the commission’s work. In addition, transportation authorities are not integrated in the effort. Like Mexican officials, representatives of other countries interested in implementing the health and environmental agenda at the Johannesburg summit have the message of Borja’s study to keep in mind.

Simply by taking measures to reduce particulate matter and ozone, countries “can provide considerable local air pollution-related public health benefits,” says the study. But the Mexican experience shows that mechanisms for political cooperation remain a challenge to effective implementation.Talli Nauman writes for the Panos Institute www.panos.org.uk where a version of this article was first published.