New State Rule Will Cut Dioxins : Pollution: The regulation is expected to shut down the majority of California’s hospital incinerators.

California residents will be protected from highly toxic dioxins emitted into their neighborhoods under a new state rule that will force more than 100 hospital incinerators to shut down within a year, air quality officials said Monday.

The hospitals and health-care centers, which use the incinerators to burn infectious medical waste along with regular garbage, must cut dioxin fumes by 99% under a regulation adopted Friday by the California Air Resources Board. An estimated 129 of the 146 hospital incinerators in the state cannot comply, so they will probably shut down, air quality officials said.

“These new standards will ensure that public exposure to a significant cancer-causing pollutant is virtually eliminated,” said Jananne Sharpless, the board’s chairwoman and the state’s secretary of environmental affairs.

Hospital officials said shutting down the incinerators will put a severe financial burden on small hospitals.

“There are regional incinerators they can haul their waste to, but the cost is significant,” said Robert Heilig, director of professional services for the California Assn. of Hospitals and Health Systems, a group representing more than 500 hospitals in the state.

For example, he said, the 57-bed Siskiyou General Hospital near the Oregon border estimates that it would cost $1 per pound, or $500 per day, to ship its 500 pounds of waste created daily to a regional incinerator.

State air quality officials said most of the hospital incinerators that must stop operations are located in residential areas and pose an unacceptable cancer risk to residents.

The Environmental Protection Agency has called dioxins the most potent cancer-causing substance ever tested in animals.

Health officials are uncertain whether the compounds cause cancer or birth defects in human beings at low concentrations, although they have been linked to severe skin disease in people, including Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, which was heavily contaminated with dioxins.

Dioxins are accidentally created during poor or incomplete combustion when waste is burned.

Heilig said the new standard will eliminate the risk of less than one cancer case in California each year, “so we’re not talking about a real significant health risk.” He said the more prudent move by the state would have been targeting the few larger hospitals that are creating toxic “hot spots” in neighborhoods.

About 20% of the state’s hospitals, or 146 hospitals, operate their own incinerators.

Most larger hospitals, especially in Southern California, already sterilize their waste and dispose of it in landfills or ship it to regional incinerators, Heilig said. Most of the incinerators that will close are in rural areas of Northern and Central California, he said.

Bill Sessa, a spokesman for the Air Resources Board, said at least 12 large incinerators now operating in California plus one large, regional one expected to open soon in Susanville can handle the waste from the incinerators that will shut down. The larger incinerators can comply by installing pollution-filtering equipment, he said. One large one, at Stanford University, already complies, he said.

Sharpless said the new rule closes a loophole in the state’s stringent pollution laws. Hospitals have been allowed to keep using the incinerators to burn garbage even though back-yard incinerators have been banned in California for 40 years because of toxic and smog-causing fumes.

Air quality officials said the hospitals were allowed the loophole until now because burning medical waste is considered one of the best ways to dispose of it safely. But the hospitals are using the incinerators for nearly all their garbage, not just infectious medical waste.