The issue of fly ash packaging and transportation has never been high on the list of issues which concern us as a people. Yet, the recent shocking news about the amount of toxic waste that the new Delimara power station will produce every day, as well as the living experience of filthy air and black dust all over Malta, has started to make us take notice!
We as a people have been waiting for 10 years for some honest answers and, of course and most importantly, some resolution. We have been ignored for too long, so we all must now force the government to do what it should have done years ago, primarily that of assuming its responsibilities to safeguard our health, seriously.
When the black dust issue once again came to the fore recently, neither the Parliamentary Secretary for Tourism nor Mepa committed themselves or excluded that its source of origin was the Marsa power station. And, yet, Enemalta themselves immediately came out with a disclaimer, stating categorically that they had nothing at all to do with it, without publishing a single study.
I was given a similar "reassurance" on the packaging of fly ash gathered from the Marsa power plant, which should, hopefully, be due for decommissioning sometime in 2012... or, rather, as recently put, once the Sicilian inter-connector comes on stream.
I was told in Parliament that fly ash from the Marsa plant is gathered in a strictly-controlled manner to ensure that no dust pollution takes place.
Minister Austin Gatt then went on to offer the "reassurance" that he is informed that, although fly ash is classified as hazardous, in fact fly ash is not toxic.
Over the past weeks I sought the independent opinion of various technical people unrelated to the political arena who all seemed to offer me opinions to the contrary of what was implied.
Their separate replies had one thing in common. They either felt that the minister was misinformed or else that he was trying to take people for a ride.
Apart from the fact that fly ash from oil combustion commonly contains heavy metals (like vanadium and nickel) studies have shown that fly ash causes respiratory diseases - from bronchitis to pneumonia and other lung diseases as well as cardiovascular and cardiopulmonary ills that are internationally known to occur more frequently. The incidence of asthma and serious related health conditions near the power station and beyond can be accepted no longer. Worse still, the PM10 component of such fly ash is carcinogenic. However, the respiratory tract can remove PM10 after inhalation. The problem is when particles are smaller, that is four microns. These are known to remain lodged in lungs and may cause lung cancer etc.
Once the minister confirmed in Parliament that the fly ash is hazardous then the Basel convention on waste applies. Particles of fly ash escaping the power station can easily contaminate agricultural land in the vicinity and produce becomes contaminated with, say, vanadium and nickel, thus turning the problem from a local issue to a national one.
According to medical opinion sought, fly ash is hazardous in the sense that it must be handled with care and precautions taken not to breathe it in, something which the average citizen cannot guard against, of course.
Once ingested, the large amounts of nickel and vanadium - the figures recently produced by Mepa in its black dust PR give 51g vanadium per kilogram of fly ash - are, in fact, toxic, if allowed to accumulate by prolonged exposure. Medicos would all agree that, in general, heavy metals even destroy kidney function.
It is true that one can have substances that might be hazardous without being toxic. A good example of such a substance is asbestos in fibre or particle form. It may not be toxic in that if ingested it is inert, producing no chemical reactions in the body. But, on the other hand, the fibres lodge in the lung alveoli are known to lead to a fatal form of lung cancer. There is an ongoing trial in Turin involving the Swiss-Belgian firm Eternit, which has three asbestos factories in Italy allegedly producing a plague of asbestos lung cancer.
As for fly ash, all the sources I contacted seem to agree that in no case would fly ash from either coal (long disused) or HFO (heavy fuel oil - increasingly relied on) be chemically inert.
All these technical arguments point in one direction. That it is sheer non-sense to claim that HFO fly ash is hazardous but not toxic.
In the area of environmental health - regardless of past sins of omission and commission - politicians in general and ministers in particular must put the health of these islands first and make what is a national concern their priority too.
Mr Brincat is a Labour member of Parliament.
brincat.leo@gmail.com, www.leobrincat.com