Stop Government funding for incinerators

incinerator

Many local groups are fighting Government funded proposals for large incinerators.

If built, they will require huge amounts of waste every year. And burn waste that could be reused, recycled, composted or anaerobically digested.

This makes no sense in the fight against climate change.

Incinerators contribute to climate change, even if they generate electricity, by:

Generating energy inefficiently
emitting more carbon dioxide than fossil fuel power stations.
Burning reusable or recyclable materials
which wastes energy and natural resources.

There are much better alternatives to incineration.

Misspent taxes

The Government is offering councils £2 billion of taxpayer funding to subsidise new waste plants, including many incinerators.

The forthcoming general election gives us a chance to call for more sustainable policies on waste management:

Moratorium on Government funding for incineration projects.
Tax on waste that is incinerated.
Targets for Britain to match the best European recycling rates.

Take action

Please send these demands to:

Nick Herbert MP
Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment
Tim Farron MP
Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment
Hilary Benn MP
Secretary of State for the Environment

Please fill in the form below - an email will be sent to each of the main political parties.

I am very concerned that the Government is giving councils 2 billion pounds of taxpayers money to fund PFI waste projects, many of which are likely to include incineration. New incinerators will require a fixed amount of waste every day over their 25-30 year lifetime, meaning that we will severely limit our future opportunities to maximise both recycling and the anaerobic digestion (AD) of separately collected food waste. DEFRA modelling already predicts that there will be too many residual waste plants (like incinerators) built by 2020. But this prediction is likely to be an underestimate, as they have assumed that waste will grow in volume - in reality it is reducing - and that recycling rates only reach 50%, when it is clear that much higher rates can be achieved. The more excess plants there are, the more they will suck in waste that should be recycled or go to AD. For example, in a number of European countries, including Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, they already have too many incinerators, and don’t recycle as much as they could. Instead, technologies for residual waste treatment should be flexible, able to scale down capacity as recycling rates increase (e.g. as food waste collection spreads) or waste volumes decrease (as has happened in the recession), and should be based on approaches with the best resource efficiency and climate performance. In addition to stopping public funding for incineration, we need to make sure that recycling is always cheaper than incineration. Landfill tax and the landfill allowance trading scheme are successfully driving waste out of landfill, but these only act to push material one step up the hierarchy. However, work carried out for the Treasury in the past has shown that the environmental damage from incineration is higher than for landfill, and that an incineration tax is justified in environmental and social terms. A tax on incineration will help ensure that recycling is the more desirable option, particularly for commercial and industrial waste. Such a tax has already helped other parts of Europe reach high recycling rates, with the Flanders region of Belgium already recycling over 70% of their municipal waste. We should be aiming to do the same. With the election coming soon, now is a great opportunity to commit your party to (i) a moratorium on public funding for incineration projects, (ii) a tax on the incineration of waste; and (iii) a commitment for Britain to match best European recycling rates. Please could you inform me of your party's plans in this area.

You can contact me by email (preferably - to save resources) or at the following address:

Title:

First name:*

Surname:*

Postcode:*

Street address 1:

Street address 2:

Town:

Country:

Email address:*

Please tick this box if you would like Friends of the Earth to use the contact details you have supplied, including your email address, to keep you up-to-date on our work and what you are helping us to achieve.

Friends of the Earth is a collective name for Friends of the Earth Trust, registered charity 281681, company number 1533942, and Friends of the Earth Limited, company number 1012357, both of which may use the above information. In both cases the registered office is at 26-28 Underwood Street, London, N1 7JQ.

To view PDF files you will need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. Visually impaired users can get extra help with these documents from access.adobe.com.