Visualising the Fallout

By Simon Gascoigne

One of our greatest challenges in getting things to a better place, is challenging human thinking and human behaviour. We are embedded and conditioned in a system that has evolved through our history with increased technological complexity. Add in things like debt and time pressure and it’s little wonder more ‘convenient’ and ‘efficient’ solutions are embraced.

When it comes to complex abstract and less accessible concepts, such as scientific data or even legislation, things can make for pretty dry reading. Pages of modeled emissions data, listening to intense debates on scientific results and methodology, the finer details of new exotic ‘high tech’ processes or tables of chemical residues listed in micrograms are prime examples.

Similarly, everyday things that we cannot  see, can quickly disappear off our personal horizon once incorporated into everyday activities.    Electricity is a classic example (hence the monthly bill surprise). The waste that we throw in the bin that gets removed is rapidly relegated to cognitive history.

So, imagine the human drama when all these elements are wickedly combined together – greenhouse gas emissions, rubbish, electricity, scientific methodology, dense tables listing chemical residues, legislation and legal processes – not to mention debt and time pressure.

The small Waikato town of Te Awamutu has been embroiled in such a drama. A company is propos to build a plant that will supposedly deal with rubbish by incinerating it at 850 degrees – and to make steam, to spin electrical generators thus potentially powering the town.

It might sound like a viable option – getting rid of waste and creating electricity at the same time. As we have discovered however, ‘convenient’ options are at risk of creating insidious unexpected outcomes on the longer timescale.    For an example with some evolving consequences (literally, in terms of fertility) think no further than microplastics being discovered everywhere in the human body where we finally decided to look – from human blood, to brain tissue, reproductive systems, breast milk and surprise – even inside bone marrow.

For incineration, the laws of thermodynamics very much apply, no matter how good the marketing material. The equation of reducing rubbish volume into ash is perfectly balanced by the release of greenhouse gas emissions (in this case some 150,000 tonnes per year), the ash, heat and the creation of exotic toxic compounds (think families of dioxins and furans). Nor does this come cheap, costing around $250 million to reduce a daily load of 450 tonnes of rubbish into around 23 tonnes of ash (or more), for the next 30 or so years.

A Municipal Incinerator – photo: Denfran from Pixabay

The application for the consent to ‘discharge to air’ (gas emissions from the chimneys and any other air pollutants), mapped Te Awamutu with static gradient lines extending away from the proposed site.  It looked like the simple line isobars on an old weather map but in this case for pollution levels. As bland and uninteresting as a modeled map could be.

Enter ‘PlumePlotter’ – a depiction of modeled exhaust plume behaviour that is updated every hour.

Plumeplotter software visually depicts exhaust gas from point sources like chimneys, using real time meteorological air data to show the behaviour of modeled exhaust plumes from either real or proposed incinerators. It also gives a visual depiction of cumulative time spent by the exhaust plume in a location.  Plume plotter also estimates ‘fallout’ – for gases such as nitrogen dioxide – of concern for respiratory effects and acidic residues, as well as anything else that might get through the plant’s filters over its 30-year lifetime.

Being modeled hourly, more data can be combined into a video and speeded up – see such video based on 2023 weather via a YouTube search for ‘Waipa incinerator plume 2023’, or see it at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfnGZyVxNJg.

Waipa Plumeplotter image (used with permission).

Right now, having listened to various arguments for and against allowing such a plant, the Board of Inquiry (convened as the issue is of national precedence) is deliberating it’s decision. We may find out as soon as mid-August as to where the decision falls.

Either way, the underlying age old root cause issue still remains – how to ‘deal with waste’, and the unforseen future consequences thereof.  Our old human habit of ‘extract, use and throwaway’, has been vastly accelerated with a fossil fuel energy surplus, combined with technological hubris, plastic prowess, powerful interests and blinded consumer choice.

The incineration proponents have argued that the highest technology will get all the ‘nasties’ out. Unconvincingly they only had to consider 10 and 2.5 micron particle sizes (PM 10 and PM 2.5) in the evidence.  Just as we have just begun to find out with ‘nano’ plastic contamination (below PM 2.5) the particle numbers just go exponential.

The longer such spreading of ‘nano’ sized particles go on, the more the waste we thought we got ‘rid’ of starts popping up, everywhere, and in everything, bioaccumulating through foodchains and soils.

We expect a decision from the Board of Inquiry soon.