Global Policy Forum

By Emad Mekay

The World Bank Group continues to fund projects around the globe that include highly polluting incinerators, while it maintains that it is pouring money into plans to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gases, civil society activists say.

Last week, the World Bank launched a new 100-million-dollar fund aimed at financing projects in developing countries that could reduce emissions of greenhouse gases associated with global warming. The BioCarbon Fund, a public-private partnership, aims to encourage public and private investment in carbon reduction projects in developing nations, in line with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

But Monica Wilson, field director with Essential Action, a civil society group lobbying the Bank to end funding for polluting incinerators, says that the programme illustrates that double standards are rampant at the Washington-based institution.

Wilson says that Bank publications and advice to southern countries continue to back waste incineration, largely failing to address current research on the technology's environmental and economic downsides, at the same time that the institution is launching funds to fight pollution and global warming. ''They are either wilfully deceiving people, or simply, their right hand does not know what the left is doing,'' Wilson said.

Incineration is known to create so-called persistent organic pollutants (POPs), including furans and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). POPs are especially dangerous because they bio-accumulate, bio-amplify, resist decomposition and are capable of being transported great distances, thus threatening human lives and ecosystems around the world.

Incinerators are also the world's primary source of dioxins, which have been shown to cause a wide range of cancers, immune system damage, and reproductive and developmental problems.

The devices are used to treat various types of waste, including pesticides and medical waste, prompting fears among environmentalists and local communities about toxic air pollution that results from what they consider an uneconomical process. Because of health risks, incinerators have grown unpopular in developed countries like the United States and Japan and in countries that are large-scale borrowers from the Bank, such as India.

Environmentalist say that although the World Bank is publicly committed to reducing POPS in some areas, via the Global Environment Facility (GEF) programme, a number of its documents still promote incineration of pesticides, medical wastes, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) by-products and PCBs, a charge vehemently denied by the Bank.

''I don't know any publications from the Bank that advocate incineration. I am not aware of any of them,'' said Steve Gorman, senior environmental specialist at the Bank. ''The basic standard that we mostly use talks about incineration as an alternative and you'd really have to go through quite a number of ideas first and through a review before you could come to that conclusion. We try and get them (borrowers) to minimise waste before going into the final solution of incineration.''

In September, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), a Philippines-based alliance of environmental groups, released a report that found that the World Bank Group, including its private-sector arm the International Finance Corporation, continued to back incineration, despite intense criticism in many countries.

The report documented 156 World Bank Group projects in 68 countries over the last 10 years that have promoted incineration, of which 26 were initiated since 2001. These included two projects in Argentina and Brazil that recommended incinerating PCBs, an Indian scheme that suggested incinerating PVC by-products, and another Indian project that recommended an incinerator at a pesticide plant.

Wilson acknowledges that incinerators tend to be included as a subset of Bank projects and that the Bank does not explicitly fund the technology, but says that this could pose an even more serious challenge. ''They seem to be almost an afterthought. It looks like when the World Bank is funding projects, they do not take waste into consideration until the very end, instead of starting from the beginning of things by saying 'how can we reduce waste, how can we make this a clean process if it is an industrial project'?'' she said.

The Bank, she says, ''doesn't include thinking about the long-term consequences of these solutions. It merely is throwing a little bit of money at the problem and hoping that could solve it''.

Wilson's and other groups are urging alternatives to incinerators, of which there are many, depending on the waste being produced. Cleaner production, reduction of waste to be land filled, or intensive recycling programmes are some options. The groups say it should be easy to phase out incinerators because they tend to be small parts of much larger projects.

But the Bank says that no other technologies have proven effective in dealing with certain kinds of waste. ''The prime way of disposing of hazardous and infectious waste is incineration,'' said Gorman. ''We'd be willing to look at other alternative technologies,'' he added, ''but at this point of time, they are not available''.

Wilson said their lobbying of the Bank has been unsuccessful. ''They have been willing to meet with us. The dialogue has been going on for years. We haven't seen any concrete changes especially in the most dangerous categories of waste they are considering for funding.''

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