by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Waste incineration is a very touchy and controversial subject to many among the environmentally conscious people.
Friends of the Earth again and again, in Britain, come out against wast incineration and on one level I am with them there and that is that much of the incineration is just a case of “great landfill in the sky”.
Waste incineration is often just a replacement for the landfill and of no further use, except of keeping the stuff out of holes in the ground, thus just replacing one way of “waste management” with another.
However, in other countries it is used for all that kind of rubbish that cannot be recycled in any way and then used to run power stations. Sweden can be seen and held up as an example here.
But, waste incineration should only be used as a last resort, for all that material that cannot be recycled, and most of it can. There is, though, always some that cannot and, until such a time that we have changed that, burning it to power electricity generators might be the lesser of the evil, especially if the right kind of filters are employed in the chimneys.
We must look at waste, as, I am sure we all by now know, with a completely different eye and we must look, aside from reducing it, to changing the components so that all can either be recycled or composted and that there is no part that cannot be recycled in one way or the other.
Until such a time, however, there will always be some part of the waste entering the waste stream that cannot be recycled in any way and it can only be dealt with in one of two ways; landfill or incineration.
While we don't want to have a great landfill in the sky really as the air is polluted enough already in the absence of a better way using the incineration of waste as a means of generating electricity might be the best option. But, as said, this does mean strict filtering and strict controls.
The ideal scenario, as far as waste is concerned, would be to have none that cannot be recycled in some way; a completely closed loop, but that is still a way off it would appear.
The reason that we seem to have to wait for that appears to me that industry just has no inkling of changing its ways. Over-packaging is still the norm in most cases and often this is the kind of material, because it is a laminate of different materials that simply cannot be recycled, properly.
TerraCycle is showing the way as to what to do with some of those things and how well the products from waste can turn out. It is also a very labor intensive and time intensive process.
On the other hand, if we would return to old style practices of making things we might, just about, be able to change those things and do away with the overproduction of waste and also have a way of recycling the waste that there is and which is useable as a resource.
Time for a real change and new ways.
© 2010
