Learn Before You Burn !- or why incineration will always be a problem By Martin J Deane 26th May 2005

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Hedon, Monday night, to a 100-packed community hall, Dr Paul Connett gave a brilliant talk on the dangers of incinerators and incineration. (I advertised this via my 200-strong email list - which YOU are welcome to join!) In a passionate presentation, New York chemistry professor Paul Connett said of incineration: "We shouldn't be doing this anyway! Even if we could make it safe, it still does not make sense." The challenge is not to get rid of it, but to STOP making it.

"If incineration is the answer, someone is asking the wrong question!" Dr Connett goes on. The answer isn't in "back-end" solutions like dumping or burning the stuff, it's in "front-end" solutions like "let's use it again", or better "how do we design zero waste into it"?

Incinerators give off nasty gases and particles called dioxins. The industry claims it is getting cleaner and cleaner (they would, wouldn't they?) Even if they do give off less gases than 20 years ago the baddies still get trapped in the fly ash or the bottom ash. Here they are concentrated so it becomes very important what happens next. Would you believe it, we stick it in a hole in the ground; we landfill it. Connett points out that toxic output eventually comes down to land contaminating grass, water, etc., and that a cow eating grass downwind from an incinerator concentrates the toxins in its body.

This is known as bio-accumulation and it accumulates, above all, in the milk. Drinking a litre of THIS milk is equivalent to standing next to the cow and breathing the same air for EIGHT months! So it's not just the people next door who are affected. The same goes for chickens, pigs, goats, you name it. The liver is our great detoxifier. It cleanses drugs from our system, and other toxins. But it doesn't work for dioxins, it can't convert it from fat soluble to water soluble, Connett explains, and so it accumulates, in your fat. Men have no way of clearing this. However, women can - by having a baby! The fat shifts from the mother to the baby developing in the womb, and gives it maybe 20 years of dioxins in one hit... The question being asked is what do we do, then, with our millions of tonnes of waste? The real answer is STOP PRODUCING IT

AIM FOR ZERO WASTE

So, here's the plan: Zero Waste 2020 - because we're not going to do it overnight! No incineration. No landfill (except what may be necessary as an interim). No to a throwaway society. Yes to a sustainable society. Yes it's idealistic BUT Nature, for example, is zero waste already... So, community responsibility, outrage, campaigning at the back end where we dump and burn, and industry responsibility, with rules, regulations and penalties, as well as good design and sourcing, at the front end.

Better industrial design - design WASTE OUT. It can be done. Repair, reuse, recycle. Industry now needs EPR - Extended Producer Responsibility. Selling is not just 'Fire and Forget'. But it's not new - we used to have this with dairies collecting their milk bottles and reusing them. They did this themselves, and this approach still makes sense.

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