ENVIRONMENT: Thailand Blows Hot, Cold on POPs Convention

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Mar 14 2002 (IPS) - Environmental activists are in two minds about where Thailand stands in the global push to eliminate hazardous substances that pollute the air when solid waste and garbage are burnt as a form of disposal.

On the one hand, they are cheering the Thai government’s decision to sign an international convention to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants (POPs).

On the other hand, the activists are questioning the Thai government’s plans to build more incinerators as a form of disposing waste.

A ranking member of Thailand’s pollution control board told a regional workshop on POPs that began here Wednesday that Bangkok would be ready to sign the Stockholm Convention on POPs by June.

“It is a significant step, for it appears that Thailand will not only sign the convention but also ratify it soon, making it the first in Asia to go as far,” says Von Hernandez, Asia coordinator of the toxics campaign at Greenpeace International, the global environmental lobby.

At present, 117 countries, including many from Asia such as Malaysia, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and India, have signed the convention that was adopted in Sweden in May 2001.

But only six nations, none of which are from Asia, have ratified the document that seeks to rid the environment of 12 toxic chemicals, including aldrin, chlordane, DDT, doxins and furans.

Despite Thailand’s good record in making a commitment to work against POPs, it does not score as well in the area of harmful waste disposal.

“Building incinerators to burn waste and garbage is a step in the wrong direction,” says Tara Buakamsri, toxics campaigner for Greenpeace South-east Asia. “Thailand has to ensure that the spirit and intent of the convention is not undermined.”

Already, Bangkok’s governing body has included the construction of four incinerators in its master plan for managing waste in the Thai capital. And so far, the national government has approved plans for one of them as part of a 7.6 billion-baht (172. 6 million U.S. dollar) waste disposal facility.

The approved disposal facility is expected to handle 2,000 tonnes of waste a day. Bangkok, a sprawling metropolis of some seven million people, currently generates more than 9,000 tonnes of waste a day, a number that is expected to rise to 12,000 tonnes of waste per day over the next five years.

All of the waste the city currently produces — from paper and plastic to food, medical waste, and electronic waste, like old computers — are sent to four massive landfills, one of which is along the borders of the city and three others in neighbouring provinces.

Environmentalists, however, are not surprised by the mixed signals coming from Bangkok on this issue, since Thailand is among the many Asian countries targeted by companies in the industrialised world that want to build incinerators in the developing world.

“Asia is under attack by waste management companies from France, Japan and the United States who are selling the line that incinerators are an efficient way of disposing waste,” says Hernandez. “Governments in the region are under pressure to set up these hi-tech facilities for waste disposal.”

“The companies are involved in a form of toxic trade in the name of waste management,” he adds. “It is definitely not sustainable.”

What is more, research done by Brenda Platt, a member of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), shows that a majority of the incinerators have been designed and tested in industrialised countries and are far from suitable for the waste stream in less-industrialised nations.

“In the global South, the moisture content of waste is frequently above 40 percent,” she writes in a report for the GAIA. “An incinerator in Surabaya, Indonesia, operates at only two-thirds of its capacity because the waste needs to be dried on-site for five days before burning. (And) a 10 million dollar New Delhi incinerator was closed right after opening because waste was too wet.”

“There is a perception that once you burn the waste, it all disappears,” remarks Darryl Luscombe, a POPs expert at Greenpeace International. “On the contrary, such incineration generates poisons into the air, including dioxins.”

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the air pollution that results from burning waste at such industrial levels affects human health, apart from damaging the environment.

“POPs are able to circulate globally, bio-magnify up the food change, and cause damage wherever they travel,” according to a UNEP document distributed at the conference here. “Their effects on humans seem to parallel those found in wildlife and include birth defects, cancer, fertility problems and increased susceptibility to disease.”

Asia is becoming a target market of developed-country waste management companies because of the amount of waste it has been generating as it heads down the road of industrialisation.

“As countries get more industrialised, they generate more solid waste, a pattern that industrialised countries know too well,” says Hernandez.

“The World Bank estimates that in the next 15 years Asia will be spending more than 50 billion dollars in waste management due to the new lifestyles that come with industrialisation,” he adds.

What is required, argue environmentalists like Hernandez, are government policies and investment to promote alternative waste management techniques like recycling and composting.

“The best approach is a community-based approach, where municipalities rationalise their waste management policies,” says Luscombe.

The Stockholm Convention, he adds, calls on developing countries like Thailand to avoid the mistakes of the industrialised countries “in terms of investing in polluting processes like incineration” and push for other processes “which do not generate toxics pollution”.

For local environmentalists like Tara, the Thai government has only to look in its own backyard for a successful example of an alternative waste management initiative.

The people of Phitsanulok, a province in north-central Thailand, have “one of the best programmes to recycle waste”, he says, one that involves people at the community level. “They have been at it for the last seven years and have succeeded in achieving 40 percent recycling of waste.”