ENVIRONMENT: Pollution Fears Unaffected by Airline Slump

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Dec 1 2001 (IPS) - The health and environmental effects of commercial aviation remain a concern despite a downswing in air travel following Sep. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

A community group here has joined U.S. aviation experts in voicing concern about the health and environmental effects of commercial aviation on nearby urban areas. At the same time, scientists are looking for less toxic alternatives to aviation fuel – including animal waste.

Community Air is opposing a proposal by the Toronto Port Authority, a Canadian government agency and manager of large sections of the city’s harbour along Lake Ontario, to expand what is now a modest airport designed to handle small jets on Toronto Island.

The group represents a growing community of residents on the city’s lakefront, formerly an industrial area.

“The Island Airport is a toxic air generator, a safety hazard and a disruptive nuisance to the thousands of people who live, work and spend recreational time on the waterfront,” says Allan Sparrow, Community Air’s spokesperson and a former city councilor.

Sparrow points to U.S. scientific research, which has explored the dangers of toxic and cancerous pollutants generated by aviation activity.

Emissions from airports and aircraft operations have been linked to cancer, asthma, brain tumours, emphysema, heart disease, leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease and numerous other conditions.

One report commissioned by city of Park Ridge, USA and released more than a year ago found that jet aircraft emitted more than 200 air toxins within the vicinity of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. These pollutants include cancer causing aldehydes, a family of chemical compounds.

An expanded Toronto Island Airport would target business travelers seeking direct access to the nearby downtown financial district instead of using the Lester B. Pearson International Airport north of the city, says John Morand, president of the Port Authority.

Morand says all of the pollution generated by small planes flying in and out of the Toronto Island airport is less than what is produced by cars along “a hundred-metre stretch of the Gardiner Expressway”, the east-west roadway along Lake Ontario.

Sparrow, however, says that a direct passenger rail link between Pearson Airport and downtown Toronto is a preferable solution to Island Airport expansion from an environmental perspective. Both diesel and electric trains generate far less pollution than fossil fuel based jets, he says.

Much of the scientific support for Community Air originates from U.S. sources. Sparrow says both the Canadian government and the Canadian environmental movement “are behind on the issue.”

Commercial jets generate about 93 percent of their pollutants near or at airports during landings, takeoffs, taxiing and idling, says Jack Saporito, president of the Chicago-based U.S. Citizens Aviation Watch, an association of physicians, pilots, air traffic controllers and aviation experts. A few years ago, the group successfully fought off similar proposals for an expanded city centre airport for Chicago.

People living and working as far as 51 kilometres from an airport face unacceptable risks, Saporito told IPS, and “shockingly, 70 per cent of our nation’s population resides within 20 miles (32 kilometres) of a major airport.”

Saporito does not want to belittle the importance of aviation for the economy, especially for long distance trips. Nor does he envision airports being relocated farther away from major urban areas.

His main solution is an expansion of high-speed rail service. “In the States about 50 percent of air travel is short and medium distance,” he says, because rail and other environmentally friendlier forms of transport have been neglected.

At the United Nations, he adds, it has been asserted that aviation is the “the framework for achieving the goal of economic globalisation.”

Fewer people are flying and some major airlines have gone bankrupt or are teetering following the Sep. 11 suicide hijackings in the United States.

At Pearson Airport near here, for instance, passenger volume is down about 15-20 percent, according to Peter Grieg, spokesperson for the Greater Toronto Airports Authority. He says that the decline is greater for flights across the Canada-U.S. border.

Nevertheless, the airport is expanding and Grieg defends plans for a fifth runway because, “in the long term, we do still anticipate that the demand for aviation services in this area will increase.”

Passenger volume, at around 29 million per year, should rise to 50 million by 2020, he adds.

Such projections are cause for urgency among scientists working on alternative fuels for aviation. The industry’s total dependence fossil fuels must stop, says Maxwell Shauck, director of the aviation science department and head of the Renewable Aviation Fuels Centre at Baylor University in Waco, USA.

Currently engaged in developing standards for small jets flying on alternative fuels for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Shauck and his colleagues have developed cleaner, less polluting jet fuels based on agricultural and slaughterhouse wastes.

Shauck says he has flown on a small jet powered by ethanol, once over Canada and a second time across the Atlantic to Portugal.

He blames “the opposition of the oil industry” for the failure of the airline industry and politicians in Washington to seriously consider biomass as a viable alternative jet fuel.