Smokin'

I return here, briefly, to follow up on the proposed increase in incineration recently announced, which has stirred up a rather unsurprising amount of controversy.

It's because of some points I picked up following our being put on the Friends of the Earth mailing list, and I have to say that in amongst all the issues raised (from breathing a huge, selfish sigh of NIMBY-esque relief that if these things are plonked in a backyard, it won't be mine, to the one I shared before on how sending up more smoke didn't seem the best idea if global warming is our biggest problem) a few key ones they made did strike me.

For instance: Incinerators are extremely inefficient generators of energy producing more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than old-fashioned coal-fired power stations. That is a fact, if an FoE one, and I have at present no counter information to doubt it. This alone puts up big red flags for the wisdom of this approach. These things are also, by all accounts, very expensive.

But the big one for me is that they require long term contracts that force councils to continue giving waste to the incinerator company, rather than recycling it. For many, many years. It locks us all in to not only a dubious solution, but one that prevents embracing better ones.

This all makes me feel this is a policy that favours those with targets to meet, those working on juicy design, build and operate tenders... and few others.

With the caveat that it is a view from one side, albeit backed by some hard-to-dispute facts, I share the following as worth reading at least: http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/up_in_smoke.pdf (I've been meaning to ask Emma to create an info category for such issues for a while, so this is a good one to kick off with. But what should it go under? Waste Disposal? Pollution? To avoid being accused of bias I think maybe both). There may well be equally well reasoned and supported counter-arguments, so if and when we get them we will of course share these, too.