Half of England’s waste is now being burned, at astronomical expense to local councils (“Anger at plans for 41 ‘dirty’ incinerators”, News). Yet Defra has, for years, resisted calls for the standardisation of waste materials collected or the separate collection of dry recyclables and organics, but it is now to implement such measures through its “simpler recycling” schemes in March 2025.
The government’s recognition of incinerator overcapacity and its plans for better collection systems is quite a breakthrough but it is not the ambition that is needed to move us to a circular economy. A recycling target of 65% by 2035 will not stop a reliance on incineration. To achieve this, all stages of the waste hierarchy – recycling, reuse and repair, eco-design and extended product lifespans – need to be driven by design.
Jane Green (former director of Zero Waste England)
Why not just burn everything and so save the costs of sorting?
“Astronomical expense” ?
Shirley burning it is the best solution. It is burned to create energy, is it not ?
The Austrians are very proud of their mega incinerator in Vienna, that pipes heating to the council flats in the city.
Anyway as usual brainless govt policy has skewed the system in the form of the Landfill Tax. Abolish that and see the country return to proper weekly bin collections.
The circular economy is another attempt to replace capitalism with communism. Less goods for people to be allowed to purchase (crap or not).
Does anyone remember a firm that had a technology to break down any organic waste to gas and oil? Must have been around 20 years ago. Whatever happened to them?
Andy,
My guess is they had a jolly good time burning through their government subsidy and then moved on to something else the farmed government subsidies when it inevitably failed.
As Otto showed in his Vienna example, the “waste heat” from incinerators can actually be used.
Block heating is one example, but here in Clogland the two “Mega” incinerators we have are parked at Moerdijk and Rotterdam Botlek.
Both places are also home to some rather sizeable refineries and chemical plants… one can guess why..
Mind.. doing this efficiently does require sorting waste, and still requires a primary fuel ( gas in both cases here.) and quite a bit of expertise to optimise the process.
And, of course, they’re major CO2 producers so Anathema to the Greenies. But there’s simply no pleasing them…
Sydney had an impressive way of getting rid of garbage, probably still doing it . Send it 900 kilometres, by truck up the Pacific Highway. About twice the distance of London to Glasgow. This was due to tipping fees in Brisbane being much lower than Sydney. Trucks would probably make the trip home empty, burning lots of diesel.
@Andy: Any fool can pyrolyse organic materials (see wood burning cars). The question is can it be done cheaper than any other way of getting rid of the waste? The answer so far is no.
I don’t think I’d want my heating to be dependent on some government run body operating a waste disposal plant.
“Help, my heating’s gone off! Its Christmas Eve and it freezing in here”
“Welcome to the Eco Heat Alliance. All our offices are closed now, until January 10th. If you have an emergency please call our Hotline on Bangalore 123123. Happy Winterval!’
@ Jim
Welcome to the wondrous world of heat pumps relying on intermittent renewables to power them.
Rising temperatures might cause some problems, but freezing people is far worse.
Jim
Austria may be a political disaster zone, but stuff does work there.
Just because idiots are in charge, it doesn’t have to mean that the place is run like a non stop episode of the Chuckle Brothers.
Easy solution:
*build loads of new incinerators
*frack gas so we can fire them up cheaply
*end the retarded Crystal Maze challenge of half a dozen colour coded tiny bins outside residential properties
*bring back normal weekly rubbish collections.
*Harry Truman
*Doris Day
Steve,
“end the retarded Crystal Maze challenge of half a dozen colour coded tiny bins outside residential properties”
Which then got thrown together, put on boats to Asia, where they just dumped it. The contract didn’t say that of course, but everyone didn’t take a hard look at what the Chinese were actually doing so they could plausibly deny it. It solved the problem cheaply and they could tick their boxes. It only stopped when a few pesky journalists started looking into it.
Recycling is like the WW2 thing about taking down all the iron railings and collecting old pots and pans to help build Spitfires. Doing your bit for the war effort. Sorting it was a ballache, but the government let people carry on because it made them feel good. They dumped a lot of in at the end of the Thames estuary.
You get bins in places with “recyclables” and “other waste” and both holes go to the same bucket. You watch the cleaners open it up and it’s like WTF? Then the next day, you see people agonising over whether their cup from Costa is recyclable or not.
WB – Recycling is like the WW2 thing about taking down all the iron railings and collecting old pots and pans to help build Spitfires. Doing your bit for the war effort. Sorting it was a ballache, but the government let people carry on because it made them feel good.
Yes! Slight aside – this used to bother me as a boy (yes I’m weird). Seeing all those handsome Victorian buildings with ugly metal stubs sticking out of the wall where a wrought iron fence used to be. It struck me as vandalism.
But I’d compare it to the WW2 thing where people were encouraged to kill their dogs. Just a bad and unnecessary policy that makes life shittier than it needs to be.
If recycling made sense, they’d pay you for your waste.
Problem is, “waste” is something of no value, isn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t be waste. It’s no longer of any value at all to its owner even though it may potentially have value to someone else, but then you have the cost of finding that person and making the transaction plus the cost of storage in the meantime.
This is why elderly have houses, sheds, garages and lofts (and lockup storage, obviously a fine business model) stuffed with objects that have theoretical value but are no longer used and are costly to dispose of. The woman who lived across the landing from me was institutionalised with dementia. The house-clearing boys turned up with their tipper truck, parked it outside the window, took the window out and simply threw the entire flat contents through that window. No idea whether they charged for this.
And so we come to local authorities charging people to take away their Christmas trees. What do you do if you have something of no value to you, which will cost you money, time and effort to dispose of? You fly-tip it, or slip a fiver to those personable travelling types to do it for you.
Why is it necessary to explain this to people who think that making you jump through hoops to sort your waste, then limiting bin collection and charging you for disposal, will somehow magically reduce the amount of waste you generate? You already generate the minimum because you bought that stuff in the first place. It had value.
Local authorities should take any and all waste, at any time, and dispose of it free of charge in whichever way makes economic sense. This would use your local taxation to create the beneficial Pigouvian externality of a waste-free environment for everyone. Top priority.
“Problem is, “waste” is something of no value, isn’t it? Otherwise it wouldn’t be waste. ”
Now thats where you’re wrong. Our Enlightened Betters (aka the Environment Agency) decree that anything can be waste, even if it has value. For example a sawmill might produce sawdust which it might sell to a company making sawdust brickettes for fire wood, or as bedding for horses. But that sawdust is considered a waste product (of the sawmilling process) and thus its disposal is covered by all the panoply of Waste Regulations. And the factory that uses (and pays good money for)the sawdust has to also adhere to all the same regulations because it is deemed to be a ‘processor of waste’. It is by these sort of processes that Our Betters get fat salaries and even fatter pensions, all the while stopping lots of people doing productive things. But if you’re a criminal who wants to tip toxic waste in a bluebell wood they’ll ignore you for years and wait until you’ve finished despoiling it before acting:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cv2d7yd9vygo
And Rachel from Accounts wonders why the economy won’t grow.
Jim, perhaps the sawmill could re-cast itself as a producer of “engineered wood particles”, and the planks are “waste”. That’d be good for a laugh, eh? Or a producer of both; running a symbiotic manufacturing process the output of which is both planks and “engineered wood particles”.
And the bluebell-wood despoilers on the whole tend to be the sort of people who enrich us, one way or the other, and therefore to be encouraged.
Anyway as usual brainless govt policy has skewed the system in the form of the Landfill Tax.
My understanding is that this was an EU directive imposed to create a ‘level playing field’ because some countries (e.g. Clogland) can’t use landfill, and so meeting waste disposal obligations is more expensive for them. Why we still have it nearly a decade after our triumphant decision to Leave is a question for the ages.
A couple of decades ago when I was a district councillor, we made a bomb from the Landfill Tax, as we incinerated almost all our waste and converted it into energy, so we had a surplus of holes which we sold to other councils who has a shortage of holes.