Politics: Waste incineration disguised as 'renewable energy'

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- CommentAuthorchocolatepixie
- CommentTimeFeb 8th 2008
Local councils under pressure from government to reduce landfill are opting for incineration of waste under the pretext that they can make electricity from the process. Don't be fooled! The results are vast amounts of mercury, cadmium, dioxins and particulates in the air, and huge quantities of ash to dispose of.

For more information take a look at

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/migrated/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/4380.pdf
This is a Greenpeace report on Incineration and Human Health

www.noburner.org.uk
This is the website of York Residents Against Incineration. It's an excellent site with lots of well laid out information. Useful wherever you are.

www.ukwin.org.uk
A fairly new national site.

If you live in Yorkshire there is an urgent need to speak up as both North Yorkshire County Council and Leeds City Council are planning incinerators in the Vale of York.
The local website for the NYCC one is www.tockwith.net and the deadline for objections is Feb 15th.
Leeds are currently considering potential sites.
- CommentAuthorLaurence Pole
- CommentTimeFeb 8th 2008
Hello

Interesting green peace report.

There is no doubt that we need electricity to sustain our level of civilisation, and there is no doubt that we will continue to produce waste that can not be practically recycled, so perhaps incineration isn't quite the scarry monster it apears to be, if it generates electricy and safely gets rid of some nasty waste. If we burned green waste that we currently compost, I can't see it causing much more polution than it already does, and we get electricty out of it. Many of the stats in the green peace report were taken from incinerator workers between 1920 and 1985. I suspect that in 1920 there were no emission controls and they literally chucked a load of un sorted rubbish in a heap at the bottom of a chimeny and set fire to it. I can't say i would welcome an incinerator in my back yard, but then I wouldn't welcome a coal fired power station either, and definately not a nuclear facility. I think it is vital that we don't dismiss technologies out of hand untill we have a real indepth understading of them. Science and technology hold the only key to a green and sustainable future.
- CommentAuthorchocolatepixie
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2008
I'm not one for arguing and usually run from conflict but I have to answer your post Laurence as it contains some serious misunderstandings.

Composting green waste isn't a way of 'getting rid' of waste but of turning 'waste' into a valuable resource. Without this natural process, the soil gradually becomes depleted of nutrients and plants and animals including humans don't thrive as well as they should. Vegetables from non-organic farms, for example, are seriously short of essential minerals.

Burning green waste certainly does cause more pollution than composting it because composting does not produce any pollution.

As far as incinerating other waste, unfortunately incineration doesn't get rid of waste safely. A local councillor living near the proposed incinerator in Yorkshire who had no axe to grind but just took his job as a councillor very seriously extrapolated the company's own figures over a year - even allowing for two weeks for maintenance - and found that far from being 'negligible' the incinerator would release several TONNES of toxic chemicals and particulates into the atmosphere each year.

Furthermore, as noted by an independent planning consultant, the planning application doesn't actually include any mention of pylons or any means of connecting the plant to the grid - so if planning permission is granted, the incinerator could run for years without ever making any electricity, which kinds indicates this is just 'greenwash'.

And I have to question your assertion that science and technology hold the only key to a green and sustainable future. Appropriate, sustainable technology can help with a green sustainable future but only when it truly is appropriate and sustainable. And it's not sustainable to call anything 'waste'. In nature everything is recycled and re-used over and over. Our oil-based society has separated us from nature's basic principles and we have to learn them all,over again.
Another example of science and technology being hailed as the answer to all our problems is nuclear power. Nuclear power is being called a low carbon technology but mining and processing uranium actually involve huge amounts of energy - guess where from? oil! (Plus nobody's mentioning that global supplies of uranium will run out in approx 40 years at current usage...)

The best answers are often the simplest, and the fact is - uncomfortable tho it is for some people, is that we are going to have to reduce the amount of energy we use. We can either choose to do this now and plan ahead for a relatively painless move into a low energy society, or we can career headlong into a disastrous plunge over the cliff edge.

I see this forum very much as part of the wise choice to take positive steps towards what I see as a better society where I think we will all slow down and have more time for each other. Call me idealistic if you want but I think a combination of optimism and realism quite a healthy response to the crisis we face.
- CommentAuthorLaurence Pole
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2008
Hello Chocolatepixie

Thank you for your very well written response

I don't want to argue either, just discuss and hopefully get me and some other people thinking a bit.

I've been reading up on incinerator stuff since my last contribution and I have to admit that the history of incineration isn't very green and I sympathise with your views and those of the good people of Yorkshire. However, if you're going to burn something to produce energy, it may as well be something that's not much use for anything else. If The incinerator burn't 'new' coal or even wood, it would also produce several tonnes of some pretty nasty chemicals. Ref my previous coments on composting, composting produces CO2 and other gases, as the material breaks down and will eventually produce just as much CO2 as burning it would, but you would't get any electricty.

I quite agree that we need to use less energy if we are not going to mess up everything beyond repair, and technology/science is helping us to do that, low energy lighting, better insulation, more efficient cars etc. I also think it seems crazy to be building multi billion Â£ nuclear stations when we have abundant wind and solar and tidal enery which is not being used, although Nuclear power is low carbon when you compare it to coal or oil/gas which both also use carbon powered machines to get it out of the ground and transport it. A few kilos of uranium produces more energy than 1000's of tonnes of coal. The comparisons are quite amazing, picture a little lump of uranium that you could hold in your hand (if wearing a lead lined suit!) compared to a heap of coal stretching as far as the eye can see. You can kind of understand why they thought they were on to a good thing!

I clearly don't know all the answers but, as you said we have to be realistic and I don't think we can go backwards. There are some pretty nasty chemicals in the world, both natural and man made, and some trully horific diseases (mostly natural) some of which have been eradicated, and yes, they may turn around and bite us on the bum at some point in the future, but for now I'm happy if the hospitals are sterilised with bleach and my food doesn't contain too many parasitic worms. What I'm trying to say is that Nature isn't always our freind; humans have tried to control it or even rise above it and generally this has improved life for most of us, now we need science and technolgy to help us keep advancing without killing everything trying.

There has obviously been some pretty bad stuff don in the name of science but, overall it (science) has been tremendiously benificial. If we loose faith in Science then I believe we can only go backwards.

Keep the faith!
- CommentAuthorJohn B
- CommentTimeMar 23rd 2008
One of the principles of permaculture is that the output of one system should be the input to another, and any unused outputs are pollution. A very good principle to follow when dealing with the unused outputs from our homes and industry. Waste shouldn't just go in a big hole in the ground, but be the input to another system, ideally in the place it was created, but that's a bit radical for most people.

Composting may produce CO2, but if it's used for growing crops surely it will be be reabsorbed in the same way that burning wood is "carbon neutral".

Maybe producing electricity is the best use for anything that can't be reused or recycled, or preferably CHP, but undesirable outputs of the system should be considered and dealt with too. Unless it's a cunning plan to deal with overpopulation by trying to kill some of us off

I'm not sure nuclear is the answer. Have a read of this http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aaVMzCTMz3ms&refer=home . I can't imagine the emissions from making just this one component are very low, and it does rather suggest that you can't just order an unlimited number of nuclear power stations and get them delivered next year. Maybe Japan Steel will still be dealing with their order backlog when the uranium runs out!
- CommentAuthorNeil K
- CommentTimeSep 7th 2008
At the risk of re-igniting the discussions; there is another side to incineration that ought to be explored. There are some things we want to burn. We call them 'fuel'.

We tend to design fuel to do the job we want, but the problems tend to arise from when they are doing things we have not designed in. i.e. climate change from the by-products. We now need to broaden the design parameters for the fuel to include atmospheric impacts. In effect we seem to be getting to the point where we need to be purely running on energy we have available, and that, at present, means solar in various forms.

In the case of waste, we tend to deem it waste when we have no further use for it. i.e the yogurt pot has successfully held the product tlong enough to let me get it home and eat it. At that point I lose interest in it and it becomes 'waste' and someone else's problem. Maybe the opportunity is to recognise that we need to wring every last piece of value out of the materials we choose to have created and one of those uses could be to keep us warm.

If we recognised that the final task of the yogurt pot was to be fuel, and we have broadened our definition of fuel to be atmospherically safe, then maybe we should be looking to re-design the packaging to allow it to be burnt cleanly. i.e if it was made of cellulose (paper/card) with plant based dyes and waxes then all the inputs to this would have been organic an derived from solar driven photosynthesis. Careful selection of the materials so that they are 'incineration friendly' would be feasible.

Such a change may well mean that the packaging becomes heavier and even requires more packaging. But if the final use is as fuel we may not mind. Naturally this also requires that the road haulage system that is carting this bigger and possibly heavier packaging about is also solar derived, but that too cannot be unreasonable.

So whilst absolutely supporting the principle of minimising waste we need to recognise that some is inevitable. Re-use is also important, as is recycling, but they will never deal with difficult residues, and these should be made compatible with fuel use. Incinerators should not be used to circumvent the reduce reuse recycle process, but they DO have their place when properly designed, operated and fuelled.
- CommentAuthorSimonH
- CommentTimeSep 7th 2008
Neil - I agree in principle with your argument - but since I found out the local council are considering an incinerator I started to wonder what exactly would be classed as waste and what isn't. Taking your yoghurt pot example - I'm aware of a company that recycle yoghurt pots into kitchen work surfaces and cupboards. So even that isn't waste.

My local council is one of the leading councils when it comes to recycling - and (after slipping behind a bit) are about to introduce recycling for ALL plastics (including cling film and yoghurt pots). Given they already recycle raw food, cooked food, paper, cans, card, plastic bottles, the only thing left to go in my black bin would be, erm, nothing. Well - ok - the empties from the vacuum cleaner, which actually - I heard can go in your compost bin. It's about time they got rid of the big black wheelie bin and gave us a big blue wheelie bin for recyling. Nappies, plastic coated paper & mouldy fabrics are the only thing that comes to mind - or the stuff that gets taken to the tip and put into the "non recylables" skip. Still none of these make up a large proportion nowadays - even the "non recyclable skip" is only 1 of about 12 different categories. So the incinerator is kind of at odds - I wonder what they plan to fuel it with... soylent green!!??

Basically incinerating kind of worries me that burning stuff might be just a cheap option - not necessarily Ecologically sound. I haven't looked into it in enough detail yet, but my initial thoughts are "burning = bad".

Simon
- CommentAuthorMike George
- CommentTimeSep 7th 2008
Hi Simon,

Interested in the plastic recycling. I read somewhere that only 3 types are recyclable in the UK and the rest must go elsewhere- China? Is your council proposing UK facilities?
- CommentAuthoragu
- CommentTimeSep 8th 2008
Come live in Sunny Slough if you want to see air pollution at its best. Not only do we have Heathrow and Europe's largest trading estate but a very large incinerator being built on the outskirts of town. They are not a good idea in my humble opinion but then maybe that's just the NIMBY in me!
- CommentAuthorchuckey
- CommentTimeSep 8th 2008
I have lived for 28 years, a couple of miles away from the incinerator at Otterbourne in S. Hants. The only problem with it is the amount of dust carts it seems to attract!!
Hampshire is still one of the foremost areas in the recycling league. They have been doing it for about 15 years, N. yorks started this year (and they haven't got it right- don't Councils talk to each other???)
As pointed out some materials can not be re-cycled yet, do people want the councils to store them until the technology exists? Perhaps if our leaders passed a law, like they have done with cars and electronic goods, to allow us to return "used" materials to their manufacturers, thing will change quickly.
Frank
- CommentAuthorjamesingram
- CommentTimeSep 8th 2008 edited
Hi
Agu check this stuff out regarding Slough CHP plant , you might be surprised ,here is a quote

"What Slough Heat and Power have demonstrated is that use of a renewable resource not only reduces emissions of greenhouse gases but has additional benefits which contribute to cleaner air and reduction of waste. This has been an excellent example of a company that has adapted its operations for the benefit of the environment as a whole. "
Dr Mike Nicholas, Environment Agency

http://www.sloughheatandpower.co.uk/About_Us.htm
http://www.tvbioenergy.co.uk/pdf/shp.pdf

I read somewhere that power stations waste enough heat energy (steam to cooling tower etc.) to heat all the urban buildings in the Uk
CHP seems to be a way forward in energy effiecency
cheers Jim
- CommentAuthorSimonH
- CommentTimeSep 9th 2008
<blockquote><cite>Posted By: Mike George</cite>Hi Simon,

Interested in the plastic recycling. I read somewhere that only 3 types are recyclable in the UK and the rest must go elsewhere- China? Is your council proposing UK facilities?</blockquote>

IIRC correctly - they couldn't do it until now because there was no where to send it. But somewhere new just opened (down south) so they are rolling it out across the district (Lichfield). They're been running Beacon status for a while - and were doing 46% recycling in 2006. We even have a tetra pack bank at the "dump", plus battery recycling, light bulbs, unlimited appliance dumping (but you have to sign). I don't go every time I finish my orange juice, but when we take garden stuff (that won't fit in the brown wheelie bin. etc, or if we're going to be passing we'll take along a box of odd and sods that don't get picked up. The only thing I'm aware of that we can't recycle is things like crisps and sweet wrappers. Another reason not to buy any!

I actually found Stafford's scheme slightly better. Instead of 2 blue boxes, they have a 3rd wheelie bin which they stick in all cans, card & bottles, and there's a separate section in the top for paper. Saves breaking your back.
- CommentAuthoragu
- CommentTimeSep 9th 2008
James,

I know about the CHP plant it's been a great idea but never advertised by the powers that be when people moan about Slough. It's the incinerator that they are trying to expand on the other side of town which will take waste from all over the place that we are all worried about. It a grundig one.
- CommentAuthorDAI_EVANS
- CommentTimeSep 9th 2008
Okay......going back to my BSc days.......

CHP is 80% efficient because the the energy produced is both heat and power, whereas a standard power station only generates power and doesn't recover the heat and is only 40% efficient. The reason CHP is only 80% efficient is because 20% of the energy produced is used to run the plant.

Admittedly there is an issue with gases produced, but there are methods available to us to reduce the gases or neutralise them. We know CO2 can be converted into carbon and oxygen but what is the financial implications? All gases can be chemically altered to be unharmful but the problem is the cost at the end of the day.

We have a solution to reduce land fill, almost every solution will have an impact on the environment. We all want a sustainable world, but without healthier environments whats the point in sustainability?
- CommentAuthorfostertom
- CommentTimeSep 9th 2008
Posted By: DAI_EVANSCO2 can be converted into carbon and oxygen
Only by inputting exactly the same amount of energy that was released when the original carbon (coal, oil, gas, wood, elephant grass, algae) was combined with oxygen (burnt, digested by animals or composted) to form the CO2. Converting CO2 that results from burning fuel is not just a matter of financial implication - it's a fundamental energy thing.

What happens when CO2 is sequestrated in u/ground caverns, spent oilfields etc? Does it gradually react with surrounding subsoil to form stable compounds? If so, where does the abovementioned energy input come from? Or does it eventually leak out? Don't tell me it stays as safely locked-away CO2 forever.
- CommentAuthorjamesingram
- CommentTimeSep 9th 2008
Sorry Agu, I'm with you now , thought you where moaning about the CHP plant, my mistake

Well, to go back to the main topic, burning waste for power ,in my mind isn't green energy
but If we keep creating it , we've got to do something with it.
Is it better to burn waste for energy or burn coal/gas/oil /uranium(fission)
or are they just as bad as one another?
Could energy from waste incinerators be consider a half way house while we get our act together?
profit would be the main incentive for Mr grundig, however they want to dress it up
I live slightly up wind of the Colnbrook(Slough)incinerator , perhaps I'd be a bit more militant if I lived say,in Staines

cheers Jim
- CommentAuthoragu
- CommentTimeSep 10th 2008
I haven't looked at the Colnbrook details for a while because it has all been silent for a while, but the concerns were two fold if my memory serves me right. One was the size, grundig were planining on taking waste from all over to incinerate and many other local authorities were stopping there incinerator plans to use Slough's ( Bad if you live in slough). The other was what they were planning to incinerate, I will look back into this because it was all kinds of scary things if I remember rightly because the thing was so big and powerful thwey could burn lots of nasties.

Were are you James? Can't be to far away surely?
- CommentAuthorjamesingram
- CommentTimeSep 10th 2008
Agu

I live just west of the Slough trading estate in the haymill ward area ,
i had a look on the web and as you say not much resent info on the Colnbrook incinerator , perhap it will just slip through under the radar
or will get shelved with the next policy change if planning holds it up long enough.
the Heathtrow area does seem to get more than it far share of enviromental degredation ,
cheers
jim
- CommentAuthorarthur
- CommentTimeSep 10th 2008
"Vegetables from non-organic farms, for example, are seriously short of essential minerals. "
What does this mean? Essential to whom? If essential to the vegetable then the vegetable doesn't grow properly - in which case we wouldn't have any non-organic veg. If essential to the eater then why am I alive to write this?
If your point is that the soil is lacking essential minerals (for vegetable growing) until they are added "artificially" then that may be true.
- CommentAuthoralex in tunbridge
- CommentTimeMay 27th 2009
Will this allay people's concerns?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_gasification

Surely the point is that burning for electricity, as long as tight emissions controls are enforced, is better than land fill.
- CommentAuthorDAI_EVANS
- CommentTimeMay 28th 2009
In Sheffield the incinerator is next door to a recycling company (who employ people with disabilities primarily) Who sort cans and plastics for recylcing. What if this could be utilised for the incinerator? I know, no one wants to be sifting through peoples rubbish but its an option, maybe it could be done to force long term 'benefit junkies' into work? The waste would come in, be sorted, recycle what we can and incinerate the rest....

....If you dont like the idea of incinerating waste or landfill what other practicle solution is there? Something that everyone would adopt.
- CommentAuthorbiffvernon
- CommentTimeMay 28th 2009
Don't generate the waste in the first place. So, from the perspective of this Green Building forum, use building materials that don't generate waste. Wood, straw, and other plant materials, stone, brick, lime and earth. Use metals and plastics only where really needed (i.e. hardly at all). Real green buildings don't generate much waste.

My local council has just rejected plans for a small, 3MW power station to be fuelled from wast wood only (no household or other waste including plastics). Our council do not understand the impending electricity shortage or the significance of global warming.
- CommentAuthorDAI_EVANS
- CommentTimeMay 28th 2009
The incinerator in Sheffield burns primarilly domestic waste.....it is a production of waste which will continue until retailers/supermarkets find a way to deliver food without the need of packaging....something I think we can safely say is pretty much impossible! yes we can say grow your own etc. but I live in a first floor apartment in the city centre and the waiting lists for allotments are ridiculous.
- CommentAuthorOlly
- CommentTimeMay 28th 2009 edited
Posted By: John BComposting may produce CO2, but if it's used for growing crops surely it will be be reabsorbed in the same way that burning wood is "carbon neutral".

Just to expand a bit on composting.

There are two types of composting (that I know of), aerobic and anaerobic. The former releases mainly CO2 but the latter also releases methane. As many people on here will know the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of Methane is about 20 times that of CO2.

So if composted correctly (aerobically) then the growing/composting process will have a neutral (ish) affect on global warming, but if composted anaerobically, such as at landfill sites then it can release methane which will contribute to global warming.

About 1/3 of waste sent to landfill is organic matter, which is compostable. Currently about 70% of the methane produced is captured/flared off, but the remaining 30% is released causing significant damage.

Home composting will not release methane if done properly (aerobically), it also means you don't need to buy as much compost, which will therefore save carbon emssions associated with the processing, packaging and transport.

Unfortunately I don't have a garden and my local council don't seem to separate compostable waste from landfill. Therefore much of what I throw away may well be controibuting to global warming. I guess I better get myself an allotment!

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