Professor is critical of incinerator risk report

An international consultant on dioxins and other toxic emissions has criticised this week's Health Research Board report which calls for more study on risks associated with incinerators.

Prof Dr Dieter Schrenk, a consultant to the World Health Organisation and the German Federal Environmental Agency, said the report raised unnecessary fears about modern incineration techniques.

Prof Schrenk, who is in Dublin this morning for the City Council's Waste Awareness Day, is also a doctor of medicine and professor of food chemistry and environmental toxicology at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany.

The Waste Awareness Day will focus on the council's waste-management plan which includes provision for a thermal treatment plant to be built at Ringsend.

One of the researchers of the Health Research Board report, Dr Dominique Crowley, said the public had a right to be concerned about living next to landfill and incineration sites. "Both have risks," she commented.

However, Prof Schrenk told The Irish Times yesterday the Health Research Board report was "irresponsible" in its conclusion that more studies were needed as "there is hardly a subject where so many studies have been carried out".

Insisting that there "is no need for more studies on dioxins or modern municipal incinerators", Prof Schrenk maintained that "the scientific community has known for more than 10 years that emissions from modern plants are so small they do not make a difference that can be measured.

"There is no impact. It is important to stress there is no impact of toxic or other emissions from modern incinerators," he maintained.

Asked about the build-up of emissions over time, he said that while emissions were measurable in the chimney, background levels of pollution from cars or heating systems were not altered by the presence of an incinerator.

Dublin City Council is proposing to build an incinerator at Ringsend as part of its integrated waste-management plan and expects to have a short-list of tenders within months.

About 25 per cent of the city's waste would be incinerated under the scheme, with almost 60 per cent going to recycling and reuse schemes. The remainder would be sent to landfill.

Dublin City Council said its Waste Awareness Day would assess recycling, thermal-treatment, landfill, composting and the effects on health of all modern waste-management systems.

Experts, among them Prof Schrenk, will be on hand to answer questions and an exhibition will be in place. A puppeteer will teach children how to make puppets from recycled materials.

The Waste Awareness Day takes place in Ringsend Technical College, Cambridge Road, from noon to 5 p.m.today and admission is free.