Renew On Line (UK) 27

Extracts from the July-Aug 2000 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

5. DETR tackles Waste

The Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions recently announced new statutory targets for recycling in its new Waste Strategy for England and Wales. To help attain them, Environment Minister Michael Meacher announced that re-use and recycling schemes will be eligible for support from the proceeds of the landfill tax credit scheme...MORE

Under the Waste Strategy, by 2003 local authorities should be recycling 17% of their waste, almost double the current amount, and by 2015 at least 33% - around four times today's rates. The targets will be reviewed and made even tougher if technology improves.

Certainly waste is a growing problem. As Michael Meacher noted , without determined action from everyone, councils could otherwise be handling a massive 50 million tonnes of household waste a year by 2020. Acting now to cut waste will, he said, avoid the need for hundreds of extra new waste facilities in the coming decades. It will also save money and the environment - recycling aluminium cans currently saves £21million a year, producing 95% less greenhouse gas emissions than using raw aluminium. ‘It will help our fight against climate change - recycling saves energy and cuts down on the amount of methane emitted from landfills.’

However, he he also noted that ‘'Where local people agree that waste-to-energy incinerators are appropriate, these will be designed not to compete with recycling schemes’.

Incineration is of course the big problem for many environmentalists- and local residents. The Green Party was quick to point out that the new Labour strategy was nowhere near radical enough on recycling- and would still require a large number of new incinerators. ‘Waste incineration is a dead technology which belongs to the last century. It has been rejected by many forward thinking nations which have levels of recycling which far exceed our own dismal targets.’

The Green party’s main concern was the potential for emissions of toxic dioxins. ‘The only safe level of exposure to dioxins is zero. Dioxins cause cancer, they accumulate up the food chain and they pollute milk . These toxics are already present in the environment at levels which threaten to our health and we must reduce human exposure now.’

It went on ‘ Energy recovered from waste incineration is in no way 'renewable'. It is burned once and then lost, except as a further set of pollutants. Our resources are far too valuable to bury and burn them. Recycling has huge benefits for water and air quality and it creates many more jobs. Waste incineration actively undermines recycling and other Green initiatives. There is intense pressure for incinerators from the companies that want to profit from them, but it is the British people as a whole that would benefit from the job-creation and cleaner environment which Green waste management strategies bring. Incinerators need huge quantities of waste to feed them. This will mean that timber, plastic and paper will be used to feed the furnaces when far more energy would be saved by recycling and reusing these materials.’

Interestingly, the Conservative Party, had already come out with a call for a moratorium on new waste incineration plants, while further research is done on the health impacts of emissions. They also proposed a target of recycling or composting 50% of the UK's household waste by 2020. The Government have certainly been having problems getting support for the current rash on new incinerators around the country, and, with their being talk of a need for up to 100 or more new plants, the Tories pointed to what it saw as the shortcomings of Labours recycling programme.

The new Waste Strategy

Currently the UK is committed to cutting landfill of biodegradable waste by around two-thirds by 2020. At current rates of growth, this would mean having to divert 33 million tonnes a year to other waste management methods, including increasing the use of waste to energy incinerators. The waste strategy sets out the changes needed to deliver more sustainable development including:

• New plans to require Government departments to buy recycled products, starting with paper;
• Statutory local authority recycling targets& action plans;
• more use of the landfill tax credit scheme to deliver an increase in recycling, particularly of household waste;
• the new Waste and Resources Action Programme dedicated to developing new markets for recycled waste;
• tradable permits limiting the amount of waste local authorities can send to landfill sites;
• extending producers' responsibility to recover their product, for example newspapers, and junk mail;
• continuing to raise public awareness, working with the National Waste Awareness Initiative.

The Combined recycling and composting targets set for household waste in England and Wales are:

• to recycle or compost at least 25% by 2005
• to recycle or compost at least 30% e by 2010
• to recycle or compost at least 33% by 2015

The DETR note that 'Recover' means to obtain value from wastes through one of the following means: recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion, and energy recovery (combustion with direct or indirect use of the energy produced, manufacture of refuse derived fuel, gasification, pyrolysis, or other technologies)

The Waste Strategy 2000 is available from the Stationery Office, Cm4693-1&2: Part 1 ISBN 0-10-146932-2 priced £10.00, Part 2 ISBN 0-10-146933-0 priced £20.00.

A new recycling website has been created with reduction and recycling advice, including interactive games and ideas. The useitagain website is www.useitagain.org.uk

DETR website - http://www.detr.gov.uk

Dioxins

As noted in Renew 107, the Dioxin debate has been rumbling on for some time. On one side it is sometimes argued that, run properly, there is little risk from incineration plants and that well managed incineration can actually reduce the net level of dioxins in the atmosphere.

On the other, opponents say that current safety limits are too high. In their response to the new DETR strategy, the Green Party quote a WHO meeting in Switzerland in May 1998, which it said concluded that dioxins are 2 to 10 times as toxic as it had seemed in 1990; and a group of German scientists who, in 1998, concluded that dioxins may be responsible for 12% of human cancers in industrialised countries.

Of course waste incineration isn’t the only potential source. The Green Party quote a 1995 US survey which found that the major sources of dioxins were municipal, medical waste and sewage sludge incineration (64% of the national total); cement kilns burning hazardous waste (5%); copper smelting (17%). But the figures for waste incineration in the UK are said to be much lower - according to a 1998 study by the Environment Agency, waste incineration adds less than 1% to average dioxin intake. For comparison, car exhausts contribute 9.5%.

However, its not just atmospheric emissions that we have to worry about; the ash created from waste combustion plants can also contain dioxins. The debate continues.

See Rachels Environment & Health Weekly 636 Feb 4, 1999