BBC News has just released an excellent exposé on the climate and policy boondoggle that is waste incineration in the UK. Buckle up for the ensuing crisis management from the EFW Lobby - here is exhibit C.
The Waste Hierarchy holds an almost sacred status in sustainability, and for good reason—it offers a simple environmental guide to waste prevention and management. However, it suffers from a critical flaw, one that the incineration lobby has exploited.
The Waste Hierarchy, developed half a century ago by European policymakers, is a framework for managing waste and resources. At the top are Prevention, Reuse, and Recycling—key concepts whose sustainability merits and order in the Hierarchy are based on solid life-cycle analysis (LCA) principles. Prevention is always better than reuse, and reuse is better than recycling because of their inherent life-cycle effects.
The problem lies in the last two levels: ‘Recovery’ (EfW) is ranked above ‘Disposal’ (landfill), implying that burning waste for energy is always better than landfilling it. While this may have made sense in the 1970s when coal dominated the grid, renewables were scarce, recycling was niche, and waste had far less fossil carbon, the order here depends precisely on such context, not any principles of LCA. EfW is not fundamentally better than landfilling, and today, the assumptions which gave it environmental preference are outdated. The truth is, both options are bad, but the least bad option depends on the material in question, and how well a facility operates. Waste policy and the Hierarchy should be agnostic about treatment technology, and instead promote the principle that residual materials should separated for treatment via the least bad option.
The incineration lobby uses the flaw in the Waste Hierarchy to ignore the need for such nuance, promoting instead the idea that diverting waste from landfills to incinerators is itself, an environmental objective. So sayeth the Waste Hierarchy. But a 'burn it all' approach to residual waste does not ensure the best environmental outcome - it only ensures incinerators continue to benefit from decades of overly simplified government policy and massive public subsidy.
It's time to fix the Waste Hierarchy to reflect a science-based approach to residual waste management that actually delivers best-case environmental outcomes.
It is time for a grown-up discussion about residual waste.
#efw #incineration #residualwaste #circulareconomy
