The Zero Waste Solution by Paul Connett

Author:Paul Connett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60358-490-6
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2013-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 10.17. A Kerb-Sort vehicle operating in Wales.

Contradictions in European Policies

By Joan Marc Simon, coordinator of Zero Waste Europe and GAIA

The European Union is known to have the most advanced environmental policy in the world and has been pioneering waste management for decades. While some places in the European Union (e.g., Italy and Spain) have implemented the most efficient and ambitious source separation and prevention programs, the European Union and its member states have also relied heavily on incineration to burn the residual waste as well as a good part of the recyclable and compostable fractions.

The Waste Framework Directive, a European law (2008/98/EC), established a binding waste hierarchy that gives priority to waste prevention, reuse, and recycling (in that order) over incineration with energy recovery and landfills, and incinerators without energy recovery. However, as nice as this can sound there are three big contradictions with European Union waste policy.

Contradiction Number One

The EU waste policy has deviated too much toward energy policy, giving overwhelming priority to energy generation over energy conservation. Indeed, it is scientifically proven and generally accepted that prevention, reuse, and recycling have a bigger impact on energy savings via the conservation of embedded energy in products than recovering energy by burning them. These savings from embedded energy are three to five times greater than the energy that is recovered when burning the waste. However, EU law doesn’t reward the energy savings associated with prevention, reuse, or recycling but does reward generating energy from waste. In the EU directive on renewable energies, burning waste made of biogenic carbon—paper, green waste, kitchen waste, and other nonfossil carbon—is considered to be carbon neutral and hence a source of renewable energy.

In figure 10.16 it can be seen how important biomass burning is for the EU statistics on renewables: 69 percent of EU renewable energy comes from biomass. The “renewable energy” generated by burning waste is of the same order of magnitude as what the European Union generates from wind power.

Consequently, the energy from incineration generated from burning biogenic carbon gets premiums per kilowatt/hour, whereas the energy saved by recycling paper or composting kitchen waste is not rewarded at all. This is clearly a perverse incentive and a contradiction with the European waste hierarchy.

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