Isonomia

By Chris Cullen

Eunomia’s recently published 4^th issue of its ‘Residual Waste Infrastructure Review’ continues to highlight the high (and growing) level of residual waste treatment capacity that is sitting with planning consent. If constructed, this will greatly exceed the amount of residual waste the UK produces and will hamper efforts to increase recycling and reuse.

Read more on Continental drift – how much might UK waste exports grow?…

by Mike Brown

Sometimes it takes a really clear expression of the fundamentals of a point of view to help you see what’s wrong with it. A couple of weekends ago, BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions came to the Gloucester Guildhall. One of the hot local topics is the county council’s incinerator plan, and a number of its opponents were in the audience, and a question was raised about whether it was “a blot on the landscape or a necessary step to securing an ecologically sustainable environment”.

Read more on Incinerators in the dragons’ den…

by Phillip Ward

Local authority recycling figures for England for the year 2011/12 have just come out from Defra. The good news is that for the first time more material is being recycled or composted than is sent to landfill. The bad news is the confirmation of what we have suspected for a while; the rate of growth in recycling is stalling.

Read more on Curious numbers…

By Mike Brown

Why isn’t merchant residual waste infrastructure getting built? Millions of tonnes of non-recyclable commercial and industrial (C&I) waste is being landfilled each year when it could be moved up the hierarchy. Meanwhile there is enough capacity with planning consent to treat 5 million tonnes per year more waste than we landfill, but many facilities remain just blueprints.

Read more on Waste infrastructure: planning to fail…

by Adam Baddeley

An article by one my colleagues last year set out an intelligent case for the export of waste from the UK for use as fuel in other European Union (EU) Member States, particularly highlighting that this need not be just a short-term fix. But the debate rumbles on, and has begun to take new forms, so I thought I would examine the numbers and see how the case for retaining our refuse derived fuel (RDF), also known as solid recovered fuel (SRF), for incineration in the UK, stacks up.

Read more on Exports: a waste of energy?…