So what's wrong with burning our waste?
Artist's impression of the planned new Edmonton Incinerator
It must be better than dumping it in landfill? The incinerator generates electricity and heat for district heating - surely that's good? If it wasn't, surely the North London Waste Authority wouldn't be building a new and larger incinerator to replace the current facility, which is fifty years old?
It's true that some benefit is being obtained from the waste in the form of heat and power, but those benefits are greatly outweighed by a whole list of problems caused by incineration.
To list just the most important:
- incinerators create a "plume" of polluted air that travels over neighbouring areas - where exactly depends on wind direction at the time, but Edmonton is surrounded by built-up areas in all directions.
- while the new incinerator will be "cleaner" and better at filtering out particulate matter from the smoke coming out of the chimney, it simply isn't possible to remove the very smallest particulates and these are the ones that penetrate most easily into our internal organs, including the lungs, heart and brain.
- burning plastic creates a particularly toxic type of pollutant - dioxins.
- quite apart from the threats to health from burning plastic, it's tremendously wasteful because plastics are made from non-renewable fossil fuels, mainly oil. They are precious materials that should be reused, not destroyed.
- there are plenty of other materials that are being burnt that could be recycled - metal, glass, paper, cardboard, to name but a few.
- last, but certainly not least, incinerators emit huge quantities of carbon dioxide, the main "greenhouse gas" that is driving changes to the Earth's climate and posing a threat to future life on earth. In 1970, when the existing incinerator was built, very few people were aware of this threat. In 2022 everyone knows and the most important challenge facing governments and local government is to bring these emissions down to almost zero as quickly as possible.
But recycling everything that can be recycled would still leave us with a residue of material that can't be reused, won't it? True, but there are ways of stopping that sort of waste being created in the first place - mainly through big reductions in the amount of unnecessary packaging, using recyclable packaging and, of course, ensuring that the products inside the packaging can be repaired and, when the time comes, themselves be recycled. The goal must be a truly circular economy where nothing is thrown away or destroyed.
Incineration is yesterday's technology. Today's technology can separate out recyclables even from general "black bag" rubbish
