[Smart Economics] Advancing Waste Treatment Technology

Improving waste-treatment technology is preferable to “waste asceticism”

In an ecosystem, roles are divided into three groups: producers such as plants, consumers centered on animals, and decomposers such as fungi and microorganisms. Things are created, consumed, and decomposed.

The human world is no different. There are businesses responsible for production and households responsible for consumption. Naturally, decomposers are needed as well. In modern human civilization, the role of fungi and microorganisms seems to fall to waste-treatment facilities. Waste incinerators, in a sense, are giant microorganisms created by modern industrial society.

Then as now, waste incinerators are NIMBY facilities. They are dirty and smell bad. When waste is burned, large amounts of heavy metals, fine dust, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals are also generated. Among these, the substance that became especially controversial was dioxin, notorious as a toxic carcinogen. There were even claims that it was 10,000 times more toxic than cyanide, and at one point it caused a huge uproar.

The fear of waste incineration and dioxin

Dioxin is an organic compound composed of oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, and carbon. It is said that when materials containing these four elements are exposed to temperatures of several hundred degrees, dioxin is formed. The problem is that most substances found in nature contain oxygen, hydrogen, chlorine, and carbon. Even if it is not garbage, dioxin is created whenever almost anything is burned. Unpleasant as it may be to say, dioxin is produced even when human bodies are cremated. People often say cigarettes are harmful to the body, and much of the reason is dioxin. After all, smoking requires lighting and burning tobacco. Dioxin is also produced during forest fires. In fact, a considerable portion of the dioxin that exists on Earth is believed to come from forest fires.

The notoriety dioxin carries today stems from the fact that Agent Orange used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War contained dioxin components. Agent Orange was a herbicide intended to remove jungle foliage, so there was no reason to use dioxin, which is harmful to the human body. However, dioxin is said to have been produced as one of the impurities during the manufacturing process.

Because of its name, dioxin is often mistaken for an artificial compound created by humans in a laboratory. But it has existed in nature since time immemorial. As mentioned earlier, dioxin is produced even by forest fires. For that reason, humans and most animals and plants have evolved to possess some degree of resistance to dioxin. Evidence of this, the author argues, is that despite dioxin’s tremendous notoriety, not a single death directly attributable to it has been reported over several decades.

The evolution of waste incinerators

However, even if it is true that fear of dioxin has been exaggerated, it is not easy to erase that fear once it has become deeply embedded in the public mind. It may actually be easier to advance waste-treatment technology so that dioxin itself is no longer emitted.

In fact, waste incinerators of the past were stigmatized as “dioxin emission sites.” Now circumstances have changed greatly. These days, incinerator purification technology has advanced to the point that there is little difference between the concentration of dioxin near an incinerator and the concentration found in an ordinary natural environment. As already noted, whenever something is burned, dioxin is bound to be produced. Yet if it does not appear, that is virtually the same as saying that much dioxin has disappeared from the world. In other words, it is a kind of opportunity benefit. In fact, people in today’s waste-treatment industry argue that waste incinerators should now be called dioxin incinerators.

Moreover, waste incinerators built these days not only burn garbage cleanly but also generate electricity, however modestly. They use the heat and energy from incinerating waste to produce electricity and supply it cheaply to households near the incinerator. Part of the waste is thus reused as electricity.

In modern industrial society, it is difficult to avoid an increase in waste. Waste is a natural byproduct of the high quality of life enjoyed by modern people. The more advanced a country becomes, the more waste each person generates. Yet some environmental activists pressure such modern people to feel guilty. They criticize them as if, in exchange for enjoying a comfortable life, they are turning the Earth into a garbage dump.

If so, is it right to give up advanced civilization and a convenient life in order to reduce waste? And how many modern people would actually agree to return to the inconveniences of the past? Would it not be wiser to fully enjoy the benefits of civilization while at the same time investing more money in waste-treatment technology and waste-recycling technology? We should remember that today’s cutting-edge waste-treatment technologies that suppress dioxin generation did not come from the ascetic methods proposed by environmentalists, but from the enterprising solutions of scientists and entrepreneurs who believed in science and technology and invested in them.

▲ Please remember

These days, incinerator purification technology has advanced to the point that there is little difference between the concentration of dioxin near an incinerator and the concentration found in an ordinary natural environment. We should remember that today’s cutting-edge waste-treatment technologies that suppress dioxin generation did not come from the ascetic methods proposed by environmentalists, but from the enterprising solutions of scientists and entrepreneurs who believed in science and technology and invested in them.

Sung-no Choi, President, Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: [스마트 경제 읽기] 진보하는 쓰레기 처리 기술

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2020-12-14

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=5&idx=23350