Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Jul 20 2011 (IPS) – Survey your surroundings and you ll discover that coal ash waste from coal burned to produce electricity is more present in everyday life than you might expect. To name a few places: toothpaste, cosmetics, wallboard, cement, and agricultural and winter de-icing products.
Coal ash, also known as coal combustion residues (CCRs), and its beneficial uses recycling it in commercial, consumer, or agricultural products- have lately been an area of controversy between those who seek greater regulation of coal ash reuse and those who unwaveringly promote it as economically and environmentally beneficial.
The U.S. (EPA) promotes the beneficial use of coal ash, but reports indicate that the agency is not fully aware of the potential hazards.
A filed in March by EPA s Office of the Inspector General stated simply, EPA did not follow accepted and standard practices in determining the safety of the 15 categories of CCR beneficial uses it promoted.
The Coal Combustion Products Partnership (C2P2) is an official partnership between the EPA, coal industry groups and other organisations working to promote and increase the beneficial uses of coal ash. The EPA suspended C2P2 in mid-2010 during a period of re- evaluation.
Washington-based group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has been especially critical of EPA for the past several years, citing the agency s willingness to promote the beneficial uses of coal ash without full knowledge of the risks.
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This week, it issued a declaring that EPA prevents its scientists from examining health risks of coal combustion wastes being added to consumer, agricultural and commercial products even though the agency promotes these practices as safe.
Kirsten Stade, PEER s advocacy director, told IPS a major concern was that these beneficial uses were virtually unanalysed, unregulated in any way .
The EPA has said it will develop a process to evaluate the risks of CCR beneficial uses even as it supports and promotes recycling CCRs because it offsets the adverse environmental impacts caused by burning coal and benefits human health, when managed properly.
Coal ash is rich in commercially valuable elements including aluminium, calcium and iron, but it also can also contain low concentrations of lead, arsenic, and mercury, among other metals that would make a lack of data about the effects of using such materials in consumer products reasonably alarming.
What is coal ash?
EPA records from 2008 indicate that 136 million tonnes of coal ash are produced per year. Nearly half of that is recycled in beneficial uses, while the remaining half is disposed of in surface impoundments and landfills.
Recycled coal ash falls into two forms, encapsulated and unencapsulated. In the first, coal ash is bound into products such as wallboard or concrete. In the second, coal ash is loose, such as in sludge form.
EPA said that it has not identified any environmental harm associated with the beneficial uses of coal ash. At the same time, it acknowledged that it had identified concerns in some land-based uses for unencapsulated CCRs if proper practices were not followed, though it did not specify whether those concerns were environmental or health-related.
When coal ash is not recycled, however, contaminants in it can leak into drinking water and pose serious public health hazards. Last year, the EPA put forth two proposals to regulate coal ash disposal in order to address the risks inherent in the process, though it does not propose to regulate the beneficial uses of coal ash.
Uses for coal ash, including in cement and concrete, structural filler, snow and ice control and wallboard, are considered environmentally and economically beneficial, since those CCRs are inexpensive materials for commercial use, nor do they end up in landfills.
In 2008, an impoundment of coal ash in Kingston, Tennessee broke open, causing damage to the environment that resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.
Conflicting priorities
Stade suggested that EPA was more concerned about coal ash reuse than about awareness of the potentially adverse effects of that recycling.
She noted that two EPA toxicologists expressed concerns to the agency about the way it promoted beneficial uses in the absence of definitive information regarding the safety of coal ash recycling, asking for further research into the topic, but their concerns were ignored .
Thomas Adams, executive director of the group Advancing the Use and Management of Coal Combustion Products (ACAA), a member of C2P2 before its suspension, dismissed PEER s claims as nothing new and just a rehash of some allegations they ve been making for quite some time.
They just want to slow down any kind of effort to beneficially use these products, he told IPS,
He targeted EPA for its dubious support of the beneficial uses of CCRs, saying that it supported recycling coal ash in some places yet in others was doing nothing to help the recycling of these materials continue .
Stade levelled a final allegation at EPA, hinting at why the EPA did not want to pursue regulation of coal ash and the costs for the coal industry that regulation would entail. The EPA scientists whose concerns went ignored expressed that people that they worked with in the agency were very chummy with these industry folks, she told IPS.
