Reed said the most significant contribution made by burning tires is an increase in zinc compounds that show up in the boiler ash. The ash is deposited at Mead s Farrington Mountain landfill in Mexico. Mead is not required by the state to test for dioxin in the air. The rules do require wastewater testing, and Reed said Mead does not have any detectable levels of dioxin in its wastewater. We ought to be moving toward cleaner fuels.
Incineration is a false promise.
It moves some of it into the air as air pollution and some into ash. It s a shell game. Several weeks ago, the Environmental Protection Agency lowered its reporting thresholds for dioxin after concluding that it is 10 times more toxic as a cancer-causing agent than previously thought. But that threshold is still too high to trigger reporting for most industrial manufacturers, with the exception of municipal waste incinerators, Beliveau said. Instead, they usually test for dioxin in the ash.