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front of pipe homepage > East Sussex plans landfill in the sky Against the wishes of their electorate and without any realistic appraisal of the alternatives, East Sussex County Council have pursued their plans for a mixed waste incinerator at Newhaven, in the south of the County. The incinerator is designed to destroy preventable reusable, recyclable and compostable materials at the rate of 28 tonnes per hour, 24 hours a day for 30 years. But is this 'waste 'solution' likely to last for 30 years? East Sussex County Councillors and officers are doing their bit to cater for the world's 'dead end economy' where products and resources arrive from all over the world, end up as waste and then mostly get dumped. In East Sussex the plan is now to dump them to air instead of continuing to dump to landfill. The County Council appear to have missed the point about what eventually happens to dead-end economics. Due largely to the impending end of cheap oil, almost all used materials will in future be returned as resources for local economies. When this happens the tax-payers of East Sussex will still be obliged by the contract signed on their behalf by their Council to continue funding the incinerator for the remainder of the 30 year term, and to see the materials needed locally turned into toxic pollution and greenhouse gases. This incinerator may be the single biggest factor affecting whether East Sussex can become more sustainable or to achieve independence from declining oil supplies. So it's worth considering the circumstances in which incinerators will soon become redundant. Circumstance 1. Climate change requires radical and urgent action everywhere, including East Sussex The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (Fourth Assessment Report IPCC AR4 from http://www.ipcc.ch/ ) was released in full on 17th November 2007. This is the world's most recent and most authoritative study of climate change. The summary for policymakers (see http://195.70.10.65/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf) shows that warming of the climate system is unequivocal and that some impacts may be abrupt and irreversible. In a speech on 19th November 2007 (http://www.defra.gov.uk/news/latest/2007/climate-1119.htm) the UK Prime Minister described the IPCC’s findings as a "wake-up call for the world". The PM said the Stern Report (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm ) showed that, "The costs of urgent action are far less than the costs of delay, and the earlier we act the easier and less expensive our task will be." The Government's Climate Change Bill (http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/legislation/index.htm) established a legally binding statutory commitment to a 26 - 32% national cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 as an interim contribution to global long-term cuts of up to 80%. Incineration of mixed waste is redundant in this circumstance since almost all alternative uses for the materials being disposed are far more energy efficient. The waste management options of reuse, refurbishment and recycling are based upon localised movements of materials and low-energy processing. With incineration all the materials destroyed by burning must be replaced, which involves large energy expenses for manufacturing and international movements of raw materials and products. When the UK's carbon budgets start to bite, local authorities will be actively discouraged from placing reusable, recyclable and compostable materials into the air as greenhouse gases. Circumstance 2. Municipal waste contains decreasing plastics, paper, cardboard and wood Incineration is entirely dependent on the composition of waste. Without enough dry burnable materials the waste mixture simply won't combust. Incinerator operators routinely blend different batches of wastes to help dispose of less combustible batches. If the composition of waste changes to include less plastics, paper, cardboard or wood then the waste mix can become non-combustible. Incineration is then only possible by preheating the waste which would make the incinerator a net energy user rather than a net energy supplier. (Ref Dr Jeffrey Morris, 'Competition Between Recycling and Incineration'. Gowling, Strathy & Henderson Toronto, Ontario 1996: page 2 http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Recycling-And-Incineration.htm). Revenue from energy sales would disappear, to be replaced by escalating energy costs. The incinerator would become a financial white elephant, imposing a long-term burden on local taxpayers. In addition, the proportion of waste disposable to air would fall, with a corresponding rise in the proportion of residues and ash sent on to landfill. What could cause less plastics, paper, cardboard or wood in municipal waste?
Incineration of mixed waste would quickly become redundant in this circumstance. Circumstance 3. The economics of incineration changes Incineration is currently only viable because the social and environmental costs of incineration are only partially regulated and accounted within the financing of incineration. For example there is currently no regulation nor measurement of CO2 emissions nor of fine particulates (PM2.5 - particulate matter with diameters of 2.5 micrometers or less). Since fine particulates are largely formed in the emissions plume, outside the chimney stack, they have historically been ignored. Both CO2 and PM2.5s are liberally produced by incinerators - in fact incinerators may be seen as efficiently converting controlled solid wastes into uncontrolled invisible wastes. Of the hundreds of substances emitted by incinerators none are required to be measured continuously and only a handful are measured at all. This leaves incineration highly vulnerable to new research and new awareness of any problematic substance. CO2 and N2O emissions are greenhouse gases which cannot escape any serious attempt by the UK to implement its Climate Change Bill. Such emissions can be controlled either by direct regulation (requiring carbon capture for example) or by inclusion in market mechanisms such as carbon trading. In either case the financial viability of incineration is undermined. Another example is the forthcoming EU Ambient Air Quality Directive which is designed to reduce PM2.5s by 75% by setting caps on urban PM2.5 concentrations. The European Commission describes PM2.5s as "the big killer" so processes such as incineration my expect to soon be asked to pay for the costs they impose. (See http://www.euractiv.com/en/environment/eu-clean-air-strategy/article-145376) Incineration of mixed waste faces being redundant across a wide range of future economic circumstances. The global escalation of prices for many materials (caused by rising demand in Asian economies) will continue to increase demand for recycled materials and make their destruction by burning less viable. The UK Landfill Levy may be extended to include disposal to both land and air. European Producer Responsibility programmes are being rolled out for an ever increasing range of products (see http://www.defra.gov.uk/Environment/waste/topics/producer-responsibility.htm). These establish a trend for separated collections and for greater financing of recycling at the point of purchase, both of which undermine mixed waste burning. Over the medium term, between 5 and 10 years, there is potential for producer responsibility to be extended to cover both solid waste and atmospheric waste problems. On 14th November 2007 the national Green Fiscal Commission was launched (see http://www.greenfiscalcommission.org.uk). They will study how economic changes can benefit the environment, including how the costs of preventing waste can be built into product prices. Such change would signal the end of large-scale waste disposal both to land and to air. Circumstance 4. Terrorism remains a risk Due to their extremely small size the fine particulates described above take on characteristics of a gas, being able to spread long distances and to enter the bloodstream through the lungs. These characteristics have been known to governments for at least 60 years, for example in United States War Department research into the application of fine particulates in warfare. Page 3 of http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Groves-Memo-Manhattan30oct43a.htm highlights its potential use "against large cities to promote panic and to create casualties amongst civilian populations". Government policy in the UK permits the use of incineration to dispose of low level radioactive materials, which may explain why there appears the lack of preparation against the risk that terrorists can at any time deposit radioactive materials into a household waste stream destined for incineration. Since radioactivity is an atomic property it is not destroyed by incineration. Incineration instead serves to disperse radioactivity through the air across large geographical areas. Filters designed to reduce PM10 particles could have no effect on PM2.5 and smaller. Alarms for detecting radioactivity could have no effect on lead-screened radioactive materials. International restrictions on access to radioactive materials are known to be ineffective. The risk of continuing terrorism thus makes large-scale incineration of municipal waste redundant. Any local authority planning to install an incinerator is liable to prosecution under the UK ratification of the UN Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/en/06en11-a.htm. Subsection 1 of section 9 of the Terrorism Act 2006 makes it an offence for a radioactive material dispersal device to be made available for the use of terrorists. Subsections 4 and 5 define a radioactive material dispersal device to include any equipment that can cause radioactive material to disperse, with the effect that the radiation causes danger. Link: Dove 2000 are a local campaign about the Newhaven incinerator. See their site for ideas on what you can do to oppose this incinerator. http://www.dove2000.org.uk/
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