Incinerate it!
Monday, June 18th, 2007Swedes push for more incineration (kind of an old article but fuck it):
“In remote areas, for example, it would not be viable to transport waste long distance for recycling. It would make more sense to burn it locally and use the process to generate electricity.”
Greenpeace disagrees:
“It’s a nonsense to say incineration could ever be better than recycling. That would be a regressive step.”
I like the “burn it locally” idea. I mean, really locally. How quckly would people develop alternative packaging and waste reuse and reduction schemes if the alternative was that they personally had to burn their own garbage?
My personal fatasies aside, this is a good conversation to have. Recycling is not the panacea some (though I don’t know who) might think it is. A bit of recyclable material still needs to be sorted, trucked, and processed. Will doing that use more energy than putting in the ground or burning it? Will more toxic chemicals be used to recycle a plastic bottle or a tire than to create a new one from raw materials? Does burning plastic bottles in an incinerator potentially generate enough energy to offset the pollution?
If you don’t want to have to think about these problems, the answer is source reduction. Tusly should our powers of cogitation be employed.