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Investigation of brominated flame retardants present in articles being used, recycled and disposed of in New Zealand

• Executive Summary
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Estimate of the amount of BDE in New Zealand
• 3. Assessment of the fate of BDEs in waste
• 4. Profile of BDE flows in New Zealand
• 5. Risk analysis
• 6. Environmentally sound disposal methods
• 7. Limitations of the study
• 8. Conclusions and Recommendations
• Additional readings
• Appendix A Detailed data tables
• Appendix B Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether (PBDE) structure and physical properties
• Appendix C Analytical equipment and procedures
• Appendix D Certificate of analysis
• Appendix E Methods and analysis of consumer products
• Appendix F Calculating the % BDE present in consumer products
• Appendix G Details of the selected landfills and the sampling of leachate
• Appendix H Current status of the flame retardant industry
• Appendix I Non-dust sources of BDEs more prominent human intake
• Appendix J Completed Questionnaire SC-4/19 for submission of information on new POPs in accordance with SC-4/19
• Appendix L Questionnaire for organisations that manufacture articles containing BFR’s
• Appendix M Excel spreadsheet entitled ‘XRF analyser raw data’
• Appendix N Excel spreadsheets entitled ‘NZ Statistics data giving categories with raw data’

6. Environmentally sound disposal methods

Disposal of BDE containing materials in Europe and the US is incineration (since the mid 90-ies incinerators include after-burning facilities to destroy dioxin like substances) and landfilling. Large commercial landfills have leachate treatment facilities including aerobic and anaerobic treatment.

In NZ, at the landfills visited for leachate sampling, the leachate is piped or road transported to the sewer system where it is blended (diluted) and treated as part of the sewage at the municipal waste water treatment plant. To our knowledge no analysis for BDE’s is carried out on pre- and post treated leachate / sewage.

This study has (most likely for the first time) analysed BFR’s in landfill leachate. As is presented in section 4.1.1 above the quantity of BDE’s leaving a well constructed landfill is very small. We found that in the worst case scenario (‘all leachate is from the older cell 1’), the Hampton downs landfill discharges only 12.5 gram of BFRs into the municipal sewage system. This is approximately equivalent to the release into the open environment of a 0.25 kg block plastic containing BDE at 5 % from a landfill cell that contains 222 million kg of plastics per year or 1 billionths of its volume per year.

This is clearly an infinitesimal volume from which it can be concluded that properly designed and managed landfills are a secure final depository of BDE-containing plastics.

Moreover it should be realised that the anaerobic treatment step in the municipal sewage treatment plant may in fact reduce the BFR loading to the environment even further. This should be further investigated in the future.

Municipal landfills are generally well managed in New Zealand and are routinely used to dispose of most of the non recycled waste generated in New Zealand, including waste plastics. The indicative finding from this study strongly suggests that landfilling can be considered an environmentally sound means to dispose of BDE-containing polymers / plastics.

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