‘Expensive Rubbish’
Friday, August 12 2010
Mike Nattrass UKIP MEP says that there is a scarcity of rubbish and an oversupply of incinerators in an EU-wide market screaming for more household waste to burn.
Mike asks why Councils are proposing even more surplus capacity by buying foreign built incinerators and importing them into the West Midlands region, including locations in Hartlebury, Worcestershire, and Four Ashes in South Staffs.
Some Councils, such as Walsall, which are wise to the waste management game, play this soft market by exporting their rubbish to incinerators in neighbouring authorities, such as Dudley, Stoke and Coventry, thereby avoiding the need to build their own incinerators.
Others are signing expensive monopolistic contracts with foreign incinerator manufacturers who import the entire plant and then extract a 25 year contract from the Council which guarantees an annual sum of taxpayers’ money to deal with their rubbish, estimated at approximately 200,000 tonnes per year. But do Councils understand the economics of this game?
Councils are panic stricken by the EU Landfill Directive (which Mike voted against) which will fine them £48 per tonne of waste they send to landfill after March 2010, rising by £8 per tonne each succeeding April. This results in a rising demand for incineration, but there is overcapacity in these plants.
As an example of this overcapacity, Mike has drawn attention to German incineration plants which burn 2million tonnes of waste originating outside the country, in order to maintain an economically viable workload for them.
According to one recent study by Dr Harry Rosin of Bundnis fur die Zukunft, a prestigious pressure group on waste management and recycling issues, this overcapacity could expand to 8.6 million tonnes by 2020. There are current plans to construct 28 new incineration plants and to extend the capacity of 6 existing facilities, adding 5.5 million tonnes of capacity to Germany’s already oversized waste incineration infrastructure.
‘Residents have been convinced that the facilities are indispensable for the region’, says Gunther Dehoust of the Ecological Institute in Darmstadt, ‘but now they are finding out that waste from all over the world is being imported because of overcapacity.’
If these plans are implemented, overcapacity in German incineration provision could reach 26%. This is likely to result in further imports of waste or increased incineration of recyclable waste, which undermines national efforts to follow a sustainable path of waste management.
As in Germany, there should be a moratorium on the extension of UK incineration capacity and the closure of older plants ‘But in this market, Rubbish is King’ says Mike Nattrass, ‘and the amount of waste going to incineration will decline while the costs of incineration continue to increase. It’s the economics of the madhouse.’
Mike asserts, ‘Investment should be made into the extension of the recycling infrastructure, as even the best run incineration facilities release carcinogenic particles into the air, and sooner or later the residues sink to earth to be absorbed into the food chain. When this happens, even tiny amounts of toxins pose a risk to human health, as Dr Rosin’s research concludes’.
Experts are also convinced that people living close to incinerators will pay the price for this controversial business trend of the past few years, suffering increased levels of illness and morbidity as the impact on the local environment worsens.
Mike concludes, ‘There are other more environmentally friendly ways of dealing with rubbish. It is time that British technology was encouraged in this sector, instead of running to Europe on the mistaken assumption that they do it better than we do’.