Clearing the Air

It all started with a call to my office at Alaska Community Action on Toxics. A woman from south Anchorage, an artist in her mid-forties, was phoning with concerns about a medical waste incinerator near her home. The plant seemed to release smoke at odd hours, she said, often late at night while she was up working. Other times, the smokestack would spit out solid chunks of material that would then rain down on the neighborhood. The woman, who prefers not be named, suspected that the plant was violating environmental regulations. And she worried that it was responsible for the host of respiratory ailments that plagued her and her neighbors. Someone always seemed to be hacking with bronchitis or reaching for an asthma inhaler. Several women had also been diagnosed with endometriosis.

Her suspicions were well founded. After doing some checking, we learned that the operator of the incinerator—the largest medical waste facility in Alaska—was running it without the required permits. What this meant was that no one was measuring the plant’s emissions or ordering a disclosure of its contaminants. The only monitoring at all was for “opacity”—a subjective judgment about visibility by the state Department of Environmental Conservation. So with the help of a public interest law firm, Trustees for Alaska, we filed suit to force compliance with the federal Clean Air Act. The case is still pending.

Emissions from the Entech incinerator in South Anchorage have local residents worried. Photo by Linda K. Imle

Incinerators are a serious and growing problem in Alaska. Since so many isolated, rural communities have no road systems, whatever goes into an area typically must come out by air or boat. Landfill is the only other alternative, but government agencies here are keener on burning because it reduces the overall volume of waste. Unfortunately, it also concentrates that waste into a toxic haze—especially when incinerators are installed without efforts to control the wastestream, limit what is burned, or restrain what comes out of the smokestack.

This situation has taken on greater urgency with a soon-to-be-released reassessment of the environmental and health effects of dioxin from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The report synthesizes findings from about 5,000 studies and presents several disturbing conclusions:

• EPA now labels dioxin a known human carcinogen and calculates the cancer risk from exposure to be 10 times greater than reported in 1994. The lifetime risk for people with average levels of dioxin-like compounds is between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 100. This is 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than EPA’s “acceptable” cancer-risk level of one in a million.
• Background levels of dioxin may cause developmental problems, reproductive damage, and metabolic changes. Nearly all of that exposure comes from what we eat, and dioxin enters the human food chain primarily from industrial sources—such as incineration.
• Infants and children are highly vulnerable to dioxin at extremely low levels. It can depress a child’s IQ, learning ability, and thyroid function, and increase his or her risk of birth defects and infection.
• Those who are exposed to high levels of dioxin—like Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange—are more susceptible to diabetes.
• There is an association between dioxin exposure and endometriosis.

Given the serious repercussions, we knew that we needed to understand the scope of the problem in Alaska and to establish a body of research. Our grant from the North American Fund for Environmental Cooperation (NAFEC) enabled us to begin documenting incineration sources and emissions—a crucial service, since neither policymakers nor the public know much about how and where deadly dioxins are produced in our state. The EPA has only limited presence in Alaska, and our state environmental department has been hampered by budget cuts, making it easy for unlicensed facilities to operate under the radar. Then, of course, Alaska is remote and heavily rural. There is a perception that a very small population is at risk.

Alaskans, though, are subjected not only to their own incinerators but to the long-range transport of dioxin from other parts of the United States, Japan, southeast Asia, and Russia. The process has already been documented in northern Canada: Chemicals released in warmer climates tend to volatilize and migrate northward in the atmosphere, until they return to ground in Arctic and sub-Arctic environments. In Alaska, this has allowed dioxin and other toxins to bioaccumulate in the marine animals that make up the traditional diet. The orcas in the Gulf of Alaska, for example, are among the most contaminated marine mammals in the world, with high levels of DDT and PCBs in their organs and body fat. And Alaska also contributes to the contamination of the Canadian Arctic: In a September 2000 report released by the CEC, researchers identified the Juneau incinerator as one of the sources of dioxin in Nunavut.

Under our NAFEC grant, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, together with the Indigenous Environmental Network, is interviewing tribes about their solid waste disposal problems and setting up a working group of tribal representatives to address incineration issues. Over the next year we will prepare a comprehensive report with accompanying GIS maps that pinpoints the location of incinerators, catalogs their waste materials, tracks the amounts of dioxin released into the air, and details how they dispose of ash contaminated with heavy metals and other pollutants. At the same time, we are researching viable options to eliminate or reduce dioxin production.

Dioxin is one of the 12 persistent organic pollutants targeted for global elimination by the international treaty known as the Stockholm Convention. Alaska Community Action on Toxics is working to ensure that state and federal policies encourage and accelerate its phase-out.

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Other articles for winter 2002

NAFTA Partnership Grounds Bird Smugglers

Taking the Pulse of North America

Clearing the Air

Voices of Energy

CEC Names Children’s Health Board

Citizen Submission Updates

Program Notes