Garbage incinerators are also major organochlorine burners, receiving large amounts of plastics, plus smaller amounts of chlorinated solvents, paints, and chlorine-bleached paper. PVC is the lifeblood of the garbage incinerator industry, since it is highly flammable and the least recyclable of all plastics. Incineration is also a growing disposal trend for sludges from the pulp and paper industry and sewage treatment plants. These nutrient-rich sludges would be valuable fertilizers were they not contaminated with chlorinated poisons that render them useless and dangerous wastes. In fact, all incinerators convert a portion of the wastes they burn into poisons that are far more toxic and persistent than the original wastes, and emit this complex mixture of chemicals into the environment through air emissions ash residues, and waste water discharges.
All incinerators create new compounds out of partially burned fragments of the original chemicals.
The thousands of remaining mystery chemicals cannot be evaluated for their toxicity or environmental behavior. There is no known way to burn organochlorines and not create these ultra-toxic PICs. On this basis and using the estimated average organochlorine content shown above, U.S. hazardous waste burners alone emit 22 million pounds of organochlorine contaminants into the air each year. Garbage and hospital and sludge incinerators add a large but unknown amount. Ash and effluent from all types of burners release an additional, and likely far greater, organochlorine burden.