Laut BBC ist das Verbrennen von Hausmüll mittlerweile die schmutzigste Form der Macht in Großbritannien

Oh because coal closed down last week. Better than shipping it abroad though isnt it? Might as well make the most of it before we are knee deep in trash.

So according to the article the issue is the amount of plastic in modern waste. Perhaps continuing moves to stop single use plastics is a good way to go. 

The move to make everything recyclable needs to be hastened. Unfortunately, legatation needs tightening as it seems obvious it won’t happen otherwise.

Modern municipal incinerators with heat recovery are cleaner with less emissions than burning a 30kgs of chipboard.

The waste ash and slag can be used in road building. This is better than plastic in the ocean.

Of course the now 40 year old hierarchy applies reduce, reuse, repair and recycle should always be applied.

I wonder how well researched the BBC article actually is.

This isn’t really much of a substantial discovery. Of course burning mixtures of mostly plastic emits CO2, plastic being made of mostly carbon. It doesn’t seem to include any reduction for materials extracted though like metals recovered from IBA or aggregates used for construction which should reduce the effective output.

For a wider view, check out the e-waste dumps in Ghana for what happens when you try to mandate recycling of waste that aren’t sufficiently dense in valuable materials.

Using more landfill which also create leachate and GHG emission problems isn’t much of a solution either. Incineration/pyrolysis are probably the only economical ways to recover something out of waste without just dumping it for eternity or shipping it to places where labour is cheap enough. I’d rather see a push for better plants than risk waste being exported so it can further contaminate everything.

Personally I find this dangerously misleading.

What happens to the waste if we *don’t* burn it? It gets buried in landfill, *it decomposes* and it produces carbon emissions anyway. You actually have to trap landfill in a sealed chamber, because it produces methane, which is **worse**, and has to be trapped and burned.

The waste is already produced. The use it was manufactured for is over, it’s producing no further value. Why not recover electricity from it?

The problem with demonising every form of power generation is that it makes it seem that using power itself is evil. 

The question here isn’t really whether burning rubbish is polluting, it’s how polluting are the alternatives? Waste has to be dealt with somehow.

“Recycled” plastic is usually shipped to third world countries (by bunker fuel burning container ships) where it’s often either burnt or dumped at sea. That is far less preferable to just burning it at home. And the idea that we can deal with our plastic waste by just burying it in a hole in the ground is ludicrous… that is the caveman answer.  

Clearly we need to tackle the root cause which is the production of plastic in the first place… If it didn’t exist we wouldn’t have to deal with it. Plenty of alternatives to oil based plastics now exist governments just need to force their use.