Giant incinerator plan to burn household rubbish

[Howie]

Giant incinerator plan to burn household rubbish
Sep 24 2004
By Mark Hookham Daily Post Staff

THE people of Merseyside will be asked whether they want their waste to be burnt in what could be Britain's biggest incinerator.

Merseyside Waste Disposal Authority is planning to launch a massive consultation on how to best tackle the region's rubbish mountain.

Local authorities face a regime of crippling fines and other costs if they do not quickly find alternatives to dumping rubbish in landfill sites.

Last week the Daily Post revealed that the region's council taxpayers could face the prospect of bills increasing by 20% by 2010 if Government waste disposal targets are not met.

Now the MWDA is preparing to ask householders how best they think waste should be dealt with during the next 25 years.

They will present a number of disposal options with estimates on how much they would cost taxpayers. They will ask householders for their views on four different waste options:

* The dry sorting of rubbish in waste centres

* Composting rubbish in outside containers

* Composting rubbish in enclosed centres

* Extracting electrical energy from waste in a large disposal plant

The Daily Post understands waste targets will not be met if the strategy does not include some kind of so-called Energy From Waste plant.

Such a plant would break down large amounts of waste and generate electricity for the National Grid.

The public consultation will therefore also ask householders which kind of EFW plant they think would be most appropriate.

The cheapest but most controversial option would be to build what would be the country's largest incinerator.

This option was recommended in a leaked consultants report seen by the Daily Post.

Denni Newman from Friends of the Earth said: "All waste planning processes must start with the implementation of waste reduction policies and increased collection targets.

"Any strategy must include a robust presumption against incineration.

"It's simply not good enough to assume that we can continue to create mountains of waste and then dispose of it by burning"

Other, more environmentally friendly, EFW options include an anaerobic digestion plant, which uses bacteria to break down rubbish, a gasification plant, which produces gas energy from waste, or a pyrolysis plant, which is the thermal breakdown of waste within a vacuum.

It is hoped a large scale Energy from Waste plant will be ready between 2010 and 2014.

The Daily Post understands no decision will be made on its location until after the consultation results, although the leaked report identified a site in Gillmoss, Liverpool.

MWDA's chief executive Carl Beer stressed a radical strategy on waste is needed to prevent soaring costs. "We must improve on the recycling services provided by expanding kerbside programmes and educating the community to foster a recycling culture."

The consultation is due to be held before the end of the year through the MWDA's website and special focus groups.

Source: Daily Post

 

[Howie]

'Green guilt' set to transform Britain's throwaway society

Britain is rubbish when it comes to recycling, but now a £10m campaign aims to change the country's attitudes towards waste. Michael McCarthy reports on a revolution in the making

27 September 2004

What happens when the throwaway society runs out of holes in the ground to bury its waste? A great new national habit begins, that's what.

At least, that's what the Government is counting on happening, as today it launches the biggest campaign yet to promote recycling in Britain.

Ten million pounds is being spent on a series of national television advertisements and local council publicity, featuring a specially designed recycling logo, to try to persuade us to change our old ways of thinking about waste disposal.

Many people believe it's long overdue. For years recycling waste has been something only foreigners did, especially those well-ordered and regimented foreigners from northern Europe, such as the Dutch and Germans. Britain has languished very near the bottom of the European recycling league, our poor performance exceeded only by Greece and Portugal.

Although the position is rapidly improving, the latest figures show that Britain still recycles less than 15 per cent of domestic refuse, compared with more than half in Austria, Germany and the Netherlands and about 40 percent in Belgium and Sweden.

The reason is the British love affair with the rubbish dump. (Or to use the technical term, the landfill). We have been so well supplied with derelict land and old quarries in industrial Britain, and with impermeable layers of clay in the soil, that the temptation to dump our rubbish in huge holes in the ground remains irresistible.

For decades, Britain has massively over-relied on these noxious and potentially dangerous sites to cope with a municipal waste stream, which has been mushrooming unsustainably. The throwaway society is an accurate name for the phenomenon.

Fifty years ago, the main contents of our dustbins was indeed dust, or in fact, ashes from domestic coal fires, upon which much household rubbish was burnt, thereby shrinking its volume enormously.

Now we burn nothing at home. We load our bins instead with a steadily-growing pile of pizza cartons, drink cans, fast-food remnants, packaging of all kinds and mammoth piles of paper. Our annual domestic waste mountain is close to 30 million tons and has been growing at up to 3 per cent per year.

However, this seemingly irresistible force is about hit an immovable and radical piece of European Union law. Much of the extensive clean-up of Britain's environment in the past 15 years has been driven by Brussels legislation and the EU landfill directive is yet another example: it will put a legally binding halt to Britain's long love of dumping. It requires that, by 2010, rubbish disposed of in dumps be reduced to 75 per cent of the 1995 level, and by 2020, to 35 per cent.

These are huge reductions and only two options are realistically open to the Government: either a vast rise in incineration or a massive increase in recycling.

Given that any planning application for a new refuse incinerator meets ferocious local opposition, there are no prizes for guessing which course the Government has chosen.

Four years ago, its national waste strategy introduced statutory recycling targets for local councils for the first time. Yet it was starting from an astonishingly low base: Britain's national recycling figure was then only 8 per cent.

Although it has climbed to 14.5 per cent for 2002-03, and will probably reach 17 per cent for 2003-04 when the figures are announced in December, it still may not reach the official target of 25 per cent for 2005.

Why has our country seemed so reluctant to recycle? Is it something in our national character? Are we simply less disciplined in our habits than the northern European nations?

Elliot Morley, the Environment minister, does not think so. "I don't believe that," he said. "I really don't think there is a fundamental difference between the public in Britain and the public in Germany and Denmark and other countries. I would put it down simply to lack of facilities and lack of encouragement.

"We've had access to cheap landfill in a way that many other European countries have not. Now it's a question of recycling becoming a habit and then it becomes second nature. It becomes a matter of routine, as it is now in other European countries."

It is certainly the case that domestic waste recycling is effectively impossible unless both facilities and encouragement are provided by local councils. Two things are needed: individual bins or boxes to separate different kinds of waste and kerbside collection. This is the Government's proclaimed objective and it has provided more than £100m in special funding for local councils, but over the past four years it has left them with an enormous amount of individual latitude as to how they go about achieving it.

The result is a chasm between the performance of the best and worst local authority recyclers. The latest figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, published last month but referring to 2003, make fascinating reading.

The figures show that the best recycling authority in the country is Lichfield District Council. The historic small cathedral city in south Staffordshire, with its surrounding villages, recycles no less than 46.2 per cent of its domestic refuse, which is approaching continental levels. Lichfield officials say their level is so high because they have implemented a scheme that separates four waste streams - household waste, compostable waste, paper and card, and glass and plastic, with regular kerbside collections. They did it four years ago after extensive public consultation and it has simply caught on with the citizenry. "It's just become a way of life for a lot of people," said a council spokeswoman.

Contrast this with Liverpool, the worst performing authority in the country, where the city council is only recycling a minuscule 3.8 per cent of its waste. A council spokesman was unable to comment on this last week, although it is clear that such a low level must mean the facilities provided are minimal.

Full story from the Independent here.