Waste incinerators are proliferating unnecessarily around the planet. The purpose of the global action day, being observed on Sept. 7, 2005, is to help convince policy makers that the technology is neither the environmental solution to disposal of toxics nor the clean energy source that governments of developing countries from Turkey to Mexico are making it out to be.

Bejarano’s book is indispensable in this endeavor, providing an understanding of POPs, how they got here, and the procedures to follow in order to rid ourselves of them.

Among persistent organic pollutants, dioxins and furans unintentionally created and released in the otherwise controlled burning of toxic waste, continually concentrate in the food chain, causing deaths, cancers, reproductive problems, immune system alterations, hormonal disruptions, and mental deficiencies.

Bejarano, the coordinator of the Action Networks on Pesticides and Their Alternatives in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America (Rapam-Rapal), has worked with the International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN) since its founding at the 1998 U.N. Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee meeting in Montreal for the Stockholm Convention. He has dedicated his career to the cause of public participation in the decisions that have led to the convention and that will lead to its effective implementation.

The convention entered into force on May 17, 2004, and the first conference of signatory parties, including Mexico, took place May 2-6, this year in Punta del Este, Uruguay. The implementation process places priority on banning the so-called "Dirty Dozen" chemicals on IPEN’s list, among them the dioxins and furans in ash and gases from incinerators.

The citizens’ guide outlines steps governments have agreed they must take to meet the convention’s goals. Among them are replacing incinerators with state-of-the-art, best available technologies, or BATs, which are discussed in Bejarano’s guidebook.

Unfortunately many policymakers have yet to learn about these.

As a result, Turkey’s Ministry of the Environment recently announced support for waste management by incineration. Environmentalists from Greenpeace and Bumerang reacted with a July 1 news conference in Istanbul, calling for sustainable development options.

In Mexico, the Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat) has an agreement with the Mexican National Cement Chamber to burn discarded vehicle tires accumulating near the U.S. border in cement kilns. Groups on both sides of the border have mounted opposition with a letter-writing campaign to Mexican President Vicente Fox noting that many alternatives for recycling are more desirable than burning.

The same can be said of the burning of other wastes, such as those from hospital and medical facilities, for which some 50 specific economically viable disinfectant alternatives are available.

Strong community opposition in Navarra, La Rioja y Aragón, Spain, to a tire incinerator for producing energy convinced the Terna company to abandon its plan in Tudela. The decision turned a 3,000-person protest demonstration into a celebration on July 2. In the United States, 280 proposed waste incinerator proposals were dropped, in the face of public opposition from 1985 to 1994.

Australia has set an example worldwide by banningc cineration and developing its alternatives for POP treatment. The city council of Kamikatsu, Japan, has adopted a zero-waste declaration that aims to avoid incinerators by promoting appropriate technoloy.

GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, which organizes the action day, recommends governments decrease the need for incinerators by motivating reduction and removal of toxic inputs in production, producer accountability for toxic wastes, responsible consumer choices, reuse and recycling.

Blocking incinerators is an extreme position. Its end objective of zero waste is the opposite extreme. But sometimes an extreme position is a point of departure for reversing a harmful trend.

Bejarano’s book, sponsored by IPEN and the U.N., clarifies the reasons for the extremes by thoroughly explaining the area in between. It is available from Rapam in the Spanish Guía Ciudadana para la aplicación del Convenio de Estocolmo. Cecilia Allen, GAIA’s Spanish language coordinator, contributed to its sections on incinerators.

Reading the book is a good way to start taking part in the global day of action.

Talli Nauman is a founder and co-director of Journalism to Raise Environmental Awareness, a project initiated with support from the MacArthur Foundation. She is the Americas Program Associate at the International Relations Center. (talli@direcway.com)

I do not read books very often, reading is gay. However, it is raining, and Al Jazeera TV is pure shite, and I liked that film "The Shining", it was absolutely terrifying, and people always say "The book is better than the film". I have not heard of a film called"The dark Tower, the gunslinger", but there might be one, and if there were, I would not watch it, because I can read the book,: "The dark tower, the gunslinger", which will be a better and more entertaining use of my time.

Now that I have read the thing, I will give you some advice: If there is a film of "The dark Tower, the gunslinger", then for christ's sake, please, do not watch it. The book was just fucking awful and not only because the story itself was dull, it was the way the book was organised.

Many authors start their oeuvres with a self indulgent and whimsy page or two, introducing both the book and themselves, two pages which nobody reads. Two page introdiuctions are fine. Authors are great big queens and divas and imagine that other people want to know stuff about them, even though we do not, so they fill the two pages up with shite like:"The author lives in total disorganisation in Berkshire with his wife June and eleven cats", a little piece of information which is supposed to make you like the author and forgive them if their book is rubbish. I don't forgive them at all, if their books are shite, in fact, it is then that I make a point of reading the introduction, so I can go and check out messy, rambling vicarages in the english countryside and firebomb them.

Normal introductions in books are tedious self-indulgent yawny-yawn, but Stephen King has reached new heights in the extremely long introduction to the expanded version of the "The dark tower: The Gun Slinger". It is called the "expanded version" because the first version of the book was so bad, he had to rewrite it and put more words in to make it longer. Fair enough, if only he had used the extra words to make the story more interesting rather than writing a fifty page rambling introduction which was like going on a tour of his arsehole, all dark and bleak and boring as fuck. The introduction was a terribly smug and self-aware description of himself, and like, how crazy and mad he was when he first wrote the tedious tome: "When I was nineteen I was so arrogant". Well fuck me! leopards do not change their spots do they? He may well have been an arrogant article at nineteen, but he hasn't learnt from his mistakes, has he, the cunt? All that has happened with the years going by, is, the man has got so arrogant, instead of just writing boring books, he has to go on and on and on and on and on about why he writes the books. I do not care why you write books, Stephen King, I just wish you would shut up, fuck off and write about loonies creeping about and people getting posessed, that is all.
Noreen