Garden incinerators should be banned because they produce more dioxins than waste incineration, according to an expert in toxic chemicals.
The Limerick Institute of Technology hosted a Café Scientifique as part of the ongoing Science Week Ireland activities. A Café Scientifique is an informal event, where a short talk on issues relating to science and technology is followed by discussion with the public.
Prof James Heffron (UCC) said the concentration of dioxins produced by burning waste in the garden is thousands of times greater than that from a properly-run modern incinerator.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Prof Heffron said he had been horrified to see garden incinerators on sale in a hardware store recently. "They had four holes at the bottom and a chimney, and they cost only €39," he said.
He told his audience that EU directives had led to substantial improvements in the incineration process since the 1990s. "I'm not saying that I approve of incineration, but properly used, the emissions of dioxins are so low that the risk to health is very small indeed."
He said that smoking cigarettes, burning vehicle tyres, and the exhaust from poorly serviced cars produced higher dioxin concentrations than modern large incinerators.
The smoke from the mouth of someone puffing a cigarette has a dioxin concentration 40 times higher than the EU limit for incinerators.
Prof Heffron said that everything in life carried risks, from driving to drinking to overeating to participating in sports. The question was, what was an acceptable level of risk.
The EU does not have an acceptable risk policy, while the WHO has recommended that, over a lifetime of 70 years, acceptable risk should be measured in the ratio of 1:10,000, 1:100,000 or 1:1,000,000.
He said while statistical evidence shows that even though some risks are more threatening than others, people do not necessarily pay more attention to them. For example, even though statistically the ratio of deaths from lung cancer attributable to smoking is 1:3, much more attention is paid to the perceived risks from emissions caused by pharmaceutical manufacturers and the incineration industries.