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

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Can you aim for Zero Waste? Recycling paper has been made easier for us by the blue bins. Black boxes can now take many people's cans, bottles, textiles (clothes). Don't forget charity shops before throwing out old clothes, shoes, curtains. Then what do you waste? Well, what do you buy? How about buying food with no or almost no packaging. What do you do with your food waste?

Do you have a compost pile, let nature do its work. Chop up garden waste and put it on top. The natural stuff is about 40% of your waste anyway. We produce about 1 tonne EACH in a year. Double up plastic bags and use them for ages. Recycling Unlimited takes even plastic bags to do something useful with.

To Stop an Incinerator takes the community to get organised. The consultation, biased though it was, had people supporting 45% recycling. Hull's waste is rising by thousands of tonnes a year. It is a serious problem that we must take seriously in our lifestyle. Not one single company in the UK builds incinerators! So it is money finance jobs design research all happening abroad. And who says their science is any better?!

For every THREE tonnes processed at an incinerator, ONE tonne of toxic ash ends up in landfill (£140 per tonne it costs Hull City Council to dump your stuff). Connett gave great examples from his experiences around the world of cities achieving 50, 60 and 70% waste diversion away from incinerators or landfill and back into usefulness. This compares with Britain and Hull's pathetic 12%. Connett says this "has to be the centre of our attention!" What? Rubbish? YES!! For example, why is there only ONE SITE IN THE UK to recycle aluminium cans? Hull should have its own recycling plant for cans! Hull should have its own paper mill, so we can take pride in recycling our own paper, again and again. Approaches like these provide more jobs, are sustainable, and save the planet from destruction. For years in Ireland the have had a 15 cent tax on plastic bags. They are almost non-existent now and supermarkets have gone over to paper bags, they do the job and are eco-friendly (ie they won't kill us!). If we burn the plastic off electrical wire we are creating dioxins, we can create these poisons in our own back gardens. Anything which contains chlorine, PVC, etc, will give off dioxins. Incinerators also give off hundreds of compounds we know nothing about. Heavy metals as produced and concentrated by incineration, have no biological usefulness whatever. There is no safe level. The quicker we stop using them in the front end the better. Most things can be replaced by other materials with the levels of science we have today. Oh, by the way, they don't call them incinerators anymore. It's not incineration - it's EfW - Energy from Waste, great isn't it? Wouldn't it be great if, instead of burning all our products for energy, we were able to conserve all the energy that went into their sourcing and manufacture, by using them many times over?

Martin hull@greenparty.org.uk www.greenparty.org.uk/hull Still interested, then see - www.no-burn.org GAIA - Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance www.grrn.org - GrassRoots Recycling Network - Send the petition letter on the front page!

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