1000 toxicity for a minute’s exposure to burning garbage fumes in Bengaluru

Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, Oct 28, 2016, DHNS:  Spending a minute next to a burning garbage dump will expose a Bengalurean to 1,000 times more toxins than the daily safe limit, an Indo-US team of researchers has found.

The team analysed 24 garbage dumps in and around the famed garden city.

“As you walk down the street in India, there are just piles of trash growing larger and larger until somebody decides to take a match to it,” said Heidi Vreeland, a doctoral student of Duke University, USA and lead author of the study. “Even in large cities such as Bengaluru, and even in more affluent neighbourhoods, this is the norm.”

Researchers from four US institutions, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan collected emission samples from 24 garbage burning sites in Bengaluru and Hoskote for the study. While the results showed high concentrations of particles near the fires, one aspect of the experiment was eye-popping. Thanks to various organic compounds burning in each fire, the test filters turned into different colours, making a rainbow of toxins.

“When you take samples of ambient air either here in the United States or in (many parts of) India, you just get different shades of grey. But these smouldering fires turned our filters into such different colours that one of my lab-mates actually thought I was looking at a panel of eye shadows,” said Vreeland.

The wide variability found in the fumes most likely stem from the trash piles containing many different organic and plastic materials. It is also a result of smouldering, incomplete combustion, which offers at least one insight into how the practice might be improved.

“From our tests, we found that somebody standing near one of these fires is getting a dose of toxins 1,000 times greater than they would from ambient air. To put it another way, a person would only need to breathe these particles for a minute to get an entire day’s worth of hazardous particulate matter,” said Michael Bergin, professor at Duke, who led the team. “Roadside trash burning is largely un-examined as a factor that influences air quality, radiative forcing, and human health even though it is ubiquitously practised throughout India. Our results indicate that near trash-burning sources, exposure to toxic particulate matter can be extremely high,” the researchers reported in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

Every year, India generates about 62 million tonnes of municipal solid waste, out of which 5.6 million tonnes are plastic waste, 0.17 million tonnes biomedical waste, 7.90 million tonnes hazardous waste and 15 lakh tonnes e-waste. The waste generation is estimated to rise from 62 million tonnes to about 165 million tonnes by 2030. However, many municipal bodies, including Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, were rapped by the Comptroller and Auditor General in the past for their failure to scientifically dispose off waste.