Zero waste before SWERF
Why SWERF is the wrong option wherever you put it

By Alex Perkins, Liberal Democrat Canterbury City Council Leader

Much has been said about the proposal to install a SWERF facility at Shelford Quarry in Canterbury. Many of the arguments have centred on the proximity of the proposed facility to houses and schools, and the huge number of heavy lorry movements on our already congested roads.

I would like to make it clear that my opinion about the readiness of SWERF Technology and the proposed location at Shelford have not changed. I fully support and endorse the objections raised by local residents.

My fellow Executive members and I have set up an all-party working group to examine the proposal. Having now carried out my own investigation into the proposal I have the following additional comments to make:

SWERF is designed to get rid of waste. That completely misses the point and takes us away from the crucial argument. We should be aiming to reduce the amount of waste we produce at source!

Our City Council's recycling program is now winning awards and grants because it concentrates on proper collection, sorting and recycling of waste materials. It relies on educating people to realise what they are discarding and so enables them to actively participate in the recycling process. We need to continue to do this and to further educate ourselves to realise that we should not only recycle. We should aim to use fewer non-recyclable items. That is why SWERF is fundamentally wrong. It works on the simple premise that you needn't worry what you have consumed and thrown away - because there is now a magic machine that will clear up after you.

Our task is not to get rid of waste. Our task is to stop making waste.

Swerf technologies should really be classed as "waste-of-energy" facilities.

While the claim that a modern waste incinerator such as a SWERF is a"waste-to-energy" facility makes for good public relations, the reality is that they will produce very little energy - and energy production certainly doesn't justify the huge costs involved in building them. But that is only a part of the problem.

Proper recycling saves more energy than incineration yields.

We should aim to develop a zero waste approach, seeking to compost and re-use wherever possible. Then when you get down to the residual, you have to ask "why are we making things if we cannot consume or recycle them?"

We've got to train our communities and ourselves to say, look, if we can't reuse it, if we can't repair it, if we can't compost it, society and government should insist that industry shouldn't be making it.

We need a combination of community awareness and industrial responsibility to get to zero waste. SWERF is simply a waste disposal system. I believe it is the antithesis of an ecologically sound recycling programme!

And anyway, anything that heats waste up like a SWERF does is fundamentally dangerous.

When you go into these high temperature processes you convert a lot of material into gases and particulates. You have to rely on a complicated and potentially fallible filtering system. Everything is contingent on how good your air pollution control devices are as they have to capture the mercury, which is a very, very toxic substance. It's very difficult to control what goes into the air from these processes. If you've got any chlorine at all in the residual plastics that you're burning you're also going to get some dioxins. You've also got to capture that.

Fifty per cent of the municipalities in New Zealand have now adopted zero waste policies, as have several UK Councils such as Bath and NE Somerset, Braintree, Chelmsford and Newhaven. That is the sort of target we should be setting. I know lots of people will feel that to be laudable but unachievable. Well we have to start somewhere. We should take responsibility for what we buy, what we use and what we throw away. Only then will Industry and the retail network cease to produce and use non-recyclable goods!

Why should we do this? Because it's simply not good enough to say that we've got the cleanest incineration process in the world. As soon as you try to destroy matter at high temperature you're going to create these very, very nasty by-products which have important implications for the health of the community.

The moment you settle for energy recovery, you're destroying those materials, and what that means is you have to go back to square one. You have to go back to virgin materials, re-extract those materials and remake those objects. That process is pollution and energy intensive

Re-using, recycling and composting recovers those materials, it saves the energy, and it saves that pollution at the front end. In this context, waste-to-energy technology is very much second best.

 

(With thanks to the renowned Chemist and Environmentalist DR PAUL CONNETT of ST LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY USA - I have borrowed some of his words and I would urge you to read him as he puts many of these arguments better than I ever could.)