Dismantling Dioxins

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Chemical treatment would be a much more attractive option than incineration, says Bob Crabtree, a chemist at Yale University. If other scientists can reproduce the SiGNa Chemistry's experimental results, this method could well be the way forward, he says.

A new method for chemically treating dioxins would be welcomed, says the industry council's Merrill, but he also downplays the scale of the problem. The amount of dioxins produced has plummeted in the last two decades, he says, due to regulations ensuring that alternative manufacturing practices are put into place. The ultimate solution, Merrill says, is not in finding a better way to dispose of dioxins, but in stopping the production of them in the first place.

But Exeter's Johnston says there's still a need to properly dispose of waste contaminated with dioxins and PCBs. "It's not just the United States that has these huge stockpiles of persistent organic pollutants," he says, but places like Africa as well. "The critical question is whether [this new method] is going to be able to compete with other routes of disposal," says Johnston. It will have to be cheaper than incineration to get people to switch from burning this waste, he says.

It should be able to compete with storing polychlorinated pollutants and with existing chemical treatments for them, says SiGNA founder Lefenfeld. But he admits that the treatment won't be able to compete with incineration in cost. "Nothing is cheaper than igniting a flame," he says.