Smoke From Burning Tyres Pumps Dioxins Into Air

Smoke From Burning Tyres Pumps Dioxins Into Air
Melanie Gosling – Environment Writer

The uncontrolled burning of scrap vehicle tyres around Cape Town is pumping toxins into the air, including cancer-causing dioxins and pollutants which can cause genetic mutations and birth defects.

Black smoke from the tyres, set alight by people who recover and sell the handful of scrap metal left behind after burning, is 13 000 times more toxic than emissions from a coal-fired power plant, according to research done by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The pollutants disperse over long distances, meaning Capetonians are exposed to them beyond the spot where the tyres were burned.

The liquids and solids left behind after the tyres have been burnt can pollute the soil, surface water and ground water, and it’s possible that the pollutants can settle on pasture, food crops and in water, and accumulate in animal tissues, including meat, fish and eggs.

Humans, at the top of the food chain, are the ultimate reservoi8rs for these pollutants.

Although burning tyres is illegal, the authorities seem powerless to stamp out the practice, which is particularly widespread in Cape Town’s poorer areas where recovering the scrap metal in the tyres is a way of earning cash.

Residents in Philippi say some tyre-burning is run as “well organised operations”, like the one next to the City Council’s Cleansing Branch in Philippi where large stockpiles of tyres are kept and burned periodically. The metal that is left behind is sold to a nearby scrap dealer, they say.

Now some residents have had enough, and through the Legal Resources Centre, have called on the authorities to take action.

Angela Andrews, from the Legal Resources Centre, has written to the City Council on behalf of the South African National Civics Association, the Mitchells Plain RDP Forum and the Environmental Justice Networking Forum, outlining the health risks and uncontrolled tyre-burning and calling for a meeting to discuss how to deal with the issue.

“This has a much wider effect on Cape Town than people realise.” Dioxins are known to cause cancer from very small amounts.

“In Europe and the US the public know all about dioxins and are scared of them. Here they’re being boiled up right under our noses and no one seems to worry much,” Andrews said.

Hans Linde, head of the Cape Metropolitan Council’s air pollution control, said yesterday: “We’re very, very concerned about the tyre-burning problem, and we’re trying our utmost to get a more environmentally-friendly way of disposing of scrap tyres. We’ve been pushing government and they’ve started a process, but it’s not been as rapid as we would have liked.”

Linde said one of the problems of policing tyre burning was trying to get landowners to control tyres coming on to their land. It is illegal to dump tyres anywhere except at a hazardous waste disposal site.

“In the informal areas we have 14 of 15 landowners and we’ve tried to get them to control tyres on their land, but no one is accepting responsibility,” he said.

He said a committee had been formed under the Department of Environment Affairs to look at acceptable disposal of tyres. One proposal was to set a levy on tyres, which the consumer would pay on purchase, and which would be used to finance an environmentally acceptable method of disposal.