These skiers
are all here
because of trash.
That’s because underneath this slope is a huge garbage incineration plant.
It processes 400,000 metric tons of waste a year and turns it into energy and heat
for Copenhagen.
It also recycles 90% of the city’s metal waste.
Some say such incineration plants could be key for solving our global trash problem.
But is that true?
Or are we going to end up just getting burned?
Globally, we produce over two billion tons of household waste annually, with high income
countries generating an outsized amount compared to their populations.
37% of global waste ends up in landfills, polluting groundwater and producing methane.
Less than 20% of the world’s trash is recycled or composted.
In the Global South many people have no access to trash collection, and it often ends up
in rivers — a primary source of ocean plastic.
To get rid of as much trash as possible, as fast as possible, around one billion tons
of waste are openly burned every year.
"Open burning generates high levels of black carbon, which is soot, which has a really
strong global warming effect."
Zoë Lenkiewicz is one of the founding members of Wasteaid, and has been a waste manager
for over 20 years.
“It also generates dioxins and furans, which are known to cause cancer.
All of this is going into the local air, wherever people are burning waste.”
Women are more directly impacted, as they are often responsible for disposing of household waste.
Burning trash this way is a serious problem. But done differently, there are advantages to it.
Here’s where controlled burning, aka incineration, comes in.
Incinerators first appeared where it was hard to landfill, in London in 1874,
then in New York City, in 1885.
“The incineration process itself, it reduces the volume of the waste [by] 90 percent.”
Ella Stengler is the managing director of the umbrella organization for European waste to energy operators.
“And it fulfills the kind of sanitary task because it destroys the pollutants which are
embedded in the waste.”
The generated heat can also be turned into energy. It's called, unsurprisingly, waste to energy.
In the US, where there’s a lot of space and cheap energy in the form of oil,
waste to energy wasn’t so competitive, and many plants were closed.
But more and more plants were built in the EU.
Today they provide power to 18 million Europeans, and heat to 15 million.
They’re a common waste management option for countries like Denmark and the Netherlands, which
have almost completely eliminated landfilling.
Environmental organizations see potential in waste to energy
as a transition step toward a more circular economy,
especially in countries without much space, that need more energy.
Here’s how the plants work:
The garbage is dumped into a big pit — from there it’s fed into the furnaces.
They burn extremely hot, and the waste is reduced in a matter of minutes.
The heat from the fires generates steam, which turns turbines to create electricity.
The steam can also be used for heating.
The 10% that doesn’t burn is called bottom ash, and metals can be recovered from it.
The rest can then be used as construction material.
So the process reduces the volume of waste, creates energy, and part of the residue can even be recycled.
What’s not to love?
Well, there are a few reasons why the world isn’t full of waste to energy plants with
ski slopes on top.
One of those reasons is fly ash, which is everything caught by the filters.
It needs to be disposed of in a hazardous waste facility.
Another reason is cost.
“If there would be a waste to energy plant built,
it should be equipped with a state-of-the-art technology,
which is expensive.
And you need to train the staff to properly operate it
and also authorities to monitor it.”
Even without ski slopes, waste to energy plants can cost over one billion US dollars to build.
Without the latest technology and monitoring, pollution can reach unsafe levels,
and impact people living nearby.
And they also emit a lot of CO2: in the EU, around 52 million tonnes per year.
That’s like 430,000 cars each driving a million kilometers.
“Policymakers and industries put incineration in the same type of energy group as renewables,
like wind or solar or even nuclear."
This is Tatiana Lujan.
She leads the plastics team for ClientEarth,
and is also working to implement the EU's circular economy directive.
“But when you look at the greenhouse gas emissions of incineration, they're actually
pretty close to coal and gas, and way far from wind, solar, nuclear.
A study commissioned by ClientEarth found that controlled incineration generates between
59 and 73% of the emissions that coal would.
Classifying this energy as renewable can divert funding from more sustainable
waste management technologies like recycling.
So, where it can be correctly built and managed, controlled incineration is better than a landfill
– but it’s by far not the cleanest option to handle waste, no matter how much energy is won.
Have a look at this “waste hierarchy pyramid”
– bear with me, it’s less complicated than it looks.
At the very bottom of the pyramid is open burning or dumping,
the worst possible way to get rid of trash.
Disposal without energy recovery is next,
so landfilling or incineration without energy generation.
Then here’s where waste to energy,
which is an umbrella term for a few different methods, comes in.
Then comes recycling.
Even better is to re-use things,
often called upcycling, and at the top is prevention and reduction.
Yeah, the whole world is pretty far from the top.
That is why waste to energy is seen by some
as a quick “solution” for countries struggling with their waste.
Not surprisingly, plants are opening up around the world,
like in China, Indonesia and India.
Africa’s first waste to energy plant just opened, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
But it has proven to be more complicated than just opening up plants and burning the problem away.
One reason is that the composition of waste varies widely throughout the world.
“You can't take one model that works in a wealthy country like a cookie cutter and
expect it to work in a low-income country because it's a completely different market.”
In India, household waste is around 50 percent organic matter, like food scraps, which are too wet to burn.
And because of the lack of centralized waste collection, trash there is often mixed together.
“I don't think segregation is happening at all in majority of the Indian cities.
So that's a major, major problem.”
Pritpal Randhawa has been conducting
long-term studies on waste management in India
for the past 10 years.
“The waste has to be segregated and the undesirable material should be separated from
that waste, and only the waste with high calorific value should be burned.
But that is not something which is happening actually.”
Calorific value is a measure of a substance’s heating power —
in other words, how easily it burns.
Crude oil and mixed plastics come in at
around 40 megajoules per kilogram.
Food is about 16.
Without waste separation, lots of food scraps find their way to the furnaces,
forcing the plants to add additional fuel.
This makes the whole facility extremely inefficient.
Countries also need to have a place to store the hazardous waste.
So if incineration isn’t a silver bullet for the Global South, what are other options?
“It’s not very complicated at all – the ideal situation would be management of waste
at the decentralized level.”
And not only decentral, but diversified:
specifically suited to the environment and economy of an area.
In many cities in India, for example, waste pickers collect recyclables, which are processed informally.
Biogas generated from organic waste can be a source of fuel from Benin to Mumbai.
And plastic can be made into building material.
“With waste management, absolutely one size does not fit all.
And you really need to look at what's most appropriate for that local area.”
Waste to energy plants can work, but a trash collection system and a strong environmental regulator are both necessary.
These can be really hard to come by.
Even with them, countries need to do some careful reflection before building new plants.
“When you create incineration, you're making huge investments and locking yourself in a
system that you're going to have to continue feeding and feeding and feeding.
And that creates a disincentive for transitioning to a real circular economy.”
So before more trash burning facilities join the global system, policymakers should
look at funding more sustainable methods of waste disposal – like recycling, reusing
and most importantly, reducing our waste in the first place.
So what do you think?
To burn, or not to burn?
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