Government should focus on energy from waste, not recycling: report

Britain should build more energy from waste plants and the government should drop its obsession with recycling as the best way to reach carbon reduction and landfill targets, a new report has claimed.
In its Energy from Waste - A Wasted Opportunity report, launched yesterday (4 December), Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) said the UK would not achieve the targets solely through recycling and expressed particular concern that recyclable material was shipped overseas.
It said that EfW had an important role to play, but that the government needed to stop describing plants as waste treatment facilities and label them more accurately as power stations.
IMechE suggested that the pollution from an EfW plant was likely to be as "damaging as throwing a sugar lump into Loch Ness".
Report author Ian Arbon highlighted the gulf between the UK approach and continental Europe, where EfW is used to its potential and landfill is minimised.
He said there was a massive public and government misunderstanding about EfW that conjured up images of huge incineration plants. "This thinking derives from seeing waste as a problem and not a resource," he said.
Apart from the waste issue, there is also the need for the UK to generate energy from renewable resources. Currently no "household and similar waste" is used as fuel.
"In a climate where we have over a million people classified as being in fuel poverty, this is unacceptable," said Arbon.