As space in Britain's landfills runs out, the race is on to find environmentally friendly alternatives.
...Until a few years ago, there was only one significant alternative to landfill: incineration. The big five waste companies – Veolia, Sita, Viridor, WRG and Biffa – are all fond of incineration, though the word itself makes them jumpy. (They prefer the euphemism 'energy from waste’.) Incineration is highly effective – you can generate a lot of power from huge loads of rubbish and don’t need to do much work sorting it all out in advance. Moreover, incinerators are cleaner and more efficient than they used to be.
For the big players, incineration is the main replacement for landfill. Hayward-Higham says that if the UK is to meet its EU targets, we will need to add more than 20 million tons of 'thermal capacity’, the equivalent of 35 mega incinerators like the Belvedere plant in south-east London. This will be one of the biggest incinerators in the country when it becomes operational, expected at the end of 2012.
Unsurprisingly, environmental groups aren’t fans of incineration. According to Friends of the Earth, incinerators are considerably worse on carbon efficiency than even coal-fired power stations. It seems perverse that developed economies – so keen in other ways to kill CO2-belching industries – are looking to incineration as an alternative to landfill.
Read on at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/businessandecology/recycling/8849010/Tipping-point-what-happens-when-our-landfills-are-full.html
For the big players, incineration is the main replacement for landfill. Hayward-Higham says that if the UK is to meet its EU targets, we will need to add more than 20 million tons of 'thermal capacity’, the equivalent of 35 mega incinerators like the Belvedere plant in south-east London. This will be one of the biggest incinerators in the country when it becomes operational, expected at the end of 2012.
Unsurprisingly, environmental groups aren’t fans of incineration. According to Friends of the Earth, incinerators are considerably worse on carbon efficiency than even coal-fired power stations. It seems perverse that developed economies – so keen in other ways to kill CO2-belching industries – are looking to incineration as an alternative to landfill.
Read on at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/businessandecology/recycling/8849010/Tipping-point-what-happens-when-our-landfills-are-full.html