es0627186_si_001.pdf (2.02 MB)
Comparative Health Risks of Domestic Waste Combustion in Urban and Rural Slovakia
journal contribution
posted on 2007-10-01, 00:00 authored by Jana Krajčovičová, Alan Q. EschenroederThis paper addresses the health risk incurred by two
alternative waste management schemes: open burning of
household waste in barrels practiced in rural Slovakia
and controlled municipal waste combustion in the city of
Bratislava. Using agricultural land use data and village
population data we formulate three prototype villages, each
representing about one-third of the rural population. The
two configurations of the controlled combustion are an
outdated municipal waste incinerator (MWI) and a modern
waste-to-energy (WTE) plant equipped with modern air
pollution control devices. These configurations actually exist(ed) in Bratislava, Slovakia at the same site, but in
different time frames. The CALPUFF model provides direct
exposure data and the EMERAM software (developed in
this paper) computes indirect exposure. A major source of
uncertainty is that of the fraction of waste burned in the
open. The analysis presented here assumed 10%. At this
level, the cancer risk from open burning ranges from 10 to
80 times the commonly regarded de minimus value of
one in a million. This means that under the U.S. contemporary
regulatory culture, some regulatory action to control or
enforce the burning ban would be expected. Cancer risks
from the incinerator ranged from 7 to 371 in a million
while the WTE risks were below 1 in a million. Cancer
risks from open burning are higher than those of the WTE
plant and at the same time affect a larger portion of
concerned population.