Despite the way some commentators are spinning this report, the Audit Commission’s recently released Well Disposed: responding to the waste challenge paints a picture that is familiar to anti-incineration campaigners.
In the words of the Audit Commission:
The report looks at how English councils are responding to the challenge of finding new ways to dispose of the country’s waste which has traditionally been buried in landfill sites. The study reviews progress against meeting targets and allowances, models the costs to councils under different scenarios, and evaluates the quality of strategic planning and local decision-making.
It congratulates people and councils for their ongoing efforts to recycle and reduce the amount of waste produced in the first place. Recycling rates have quadrupled since 1999 and have dramatically reduced the amount of waste that ends up in the dump.
Some have suggested that the report supports incineration, and the report does refer to the implications of delays associated with incinerator projects, but there are many positive messages for campaigners to take away from this report:
If there were no waste growth, the national target would be met comfortably, and only a third of the available landfill allowances would be used in 2020 (p. 62).
This means that a 1% or 2% fall would result in potentially very large sums of public money having been wasted on unnecessary disposal facilities.
There is a fine example of British understatement:
Understanding the size and composition of the waste stream is important to local waste planners who have to base substantial spending decisions on predictions of the levels and composition of waste. There is currently no national base planning assumption for household waste that could be used by WDAs as the basis of their local forecasts, which could be adjusted to take account of local circumstances. Currently, waste planning is often based, at best, on a local interpretation of recent trends in waste growth and predictions about future population. Analysis of waste strategies showed that two-thirds of waste strategies either made no reference to historic trends in waste or did not seek to explain them, and only a third made good use of proxy data (for example household or population growth) for forecasting; one third made no use of such data at all. There is clearly scope for improvement in this area (p. 54).
There is a great deal about the inaccuracy of predictions used to support waste management decision, such as:
…data quality and realism of projections was the weakest area in our desktop assessment of strategies, and sensitivity analysis was particularly weak…If WDAs overestimate the amount of waste they will need to process, both the overall cost and the cost per tonne of waste processed are likely to be higher than they would have been had estimates proved accurate (p. 80).
WDAs might buy too much disposal infrastructure if they overestimate future volumes of waste arising (including other authorities’ waste or trade waste). They may also achieve a worse environmental solution if, by building large disposal facilities, they reduce their own financial incentive to pursue waste reduction or recycling initiatives (pp. 77-78).
The report shows incineration costs between £65 – £136 per tonne.
And what campaigner would be surprised to hear that:
Some WDAs have found that they continued to bear risks they thought they had allocated to a contractor. Such risks include planning delays and technology failures – contractors were able to ensure the WDA bore the risk by threatening to walk away from the contract, leaving the WDA without waste disposal infrastructure (p. 87).
There are criticisms too, not least the top-down orientation of the waste management system as depicted in the report. According to the Audit Commission “The interaction between council and citizen is the last link in the delivery chain described in Chapter 2 (p. 89)”. This is incorrect of course, because an item only becomes waste at the point where a person disposes it.
The report describes around 70% of household waste is readily recyclable (p. 75). Some would argue that the limit is nearer 93%+, in either case this brings recycling into competition with incineration, as in other European countries when governments are locked into long-term incineration contracts.
The report recognises that:
…waste collection and disposal are emotive local issues, and environmental and waste collection services have a high public profile. Decisions on rubbish collection, and planning decisions relating to waste disposal infrastructure, can be intensely controversial.
But their use of language and choice of words might suggest that sustainable waste campaigners’ opposition to incineration was not fact-based. Perhaps the phrase “passionate and well-informed” might be a better description!
The controversy surrounding the report resulted in several BBC interviews for UKWIN Coordinator Shlomo Dowen, starting with a BBC Radio 5Live interview where Shlomo Dowen was asked if incineration was a “necessary evil” – he replied: “evil yes, necessary no”. He then went on to outline how Incineration is bad:
- Bad for waste and resource management
- Bad for our democracy
- Bad for our environment
- Bad for our health
- Bad for our bank accounts
Shlomo also argued that if the Audit Commission were to conduct a democratic audit of waste management in the UK it would find alarming democracy deficits at every stage of the UK’s waste management system.
UKWIN interviewed on BBC 1
He was later interviewed as part of the BBC’s national One O’Clock News, where he provided a balancing view of waste incineration as a poor choice for managing waste.
Responding to the Audit Commission’s new report Well disposed, published today (25/09/08), Friends of the Earth’s Waste Campaigner, Becky Slater said:
This report highlights some of the critical problems councils face when they gamble with tax payers’ money by building big incinerators. Burning rubbish contributes to climate change and sends valuable resources up in smoke – it’s no wonder that they face powerful opposition from communities around the country. Avoiding landfill fines should mean maximising recycling and composting – not committing to expensive and polluting incinerators.
From Rob Whittle, NAIL2:
UKWIN’s write up of the Audit Commission (AC) report is excellent, especially regarding the AC potentially conducting democratic audit of waste management. Many stakeholders feel stonewalled by official EFW spin and unsubstantiated and wafer thin safe health claims in 4 page HPA references.
The AC report gives confused messages, some positive on data, variability in projections justifying burners, some without deeper thought. People could quote the report in different ways to suit.
No mention of AMBT, Autoclaving specifically, zero waste resource recovery parks or future alternatives, proven in the UK, or galloping in. Also there is no real Anaerobic Digestion prescriptive thrust in the report to collect food waste (mirroring the National Waste Strategy, 2007 on the issue) to tackle head on the % of biodegradable waste that is the nub of the landfill LfT, LATS drivers. If we all had a kitchen caddy, collecting it separately, investing locally in proven AD facilities would we have so much of a dilemma, or would the we have the problem half licked in no time?? Perhaps £1bn of £2bn should be spent solely on AD facilities and universal weekly doorstep collections of kitchen caddies
The residual would have substantially less tonnage, would have less food contaminating content and what was left cleaner, less, simpler to deal with whether recovery to reuse or recycling, conversion to syngas/energy or treated and landfill sequested. We might even require a revised Audit Commission report in no time called “Disposal, A Dying Doctrine”