Best of 2011: Editorial: Energy from Waste Needs a Fresh Look

Best of 2011: Editorial from December 7, 2011:

Hamilton City council continues to be presented with waste management proposals that contemplate the possible reduction of garbage collection from weekly to once every two weeks. In our view this would be a serious problem in the summer months where even with the  present weekly collection  odours, vermin and insects can make the visit by the garbage crew a “just in time” experience. It also represents a step backward at a time when taxpayers increasingly question the value they get from the taxes they pay. Before council contemplates changes to collection frequency and bag limits it should take a serious look at revisiting the energy from waste option (EFW)—we will use the word here—incineration. It may come as a surprise to many to learn that burning garbage to generate  electricity produces far less  greenhouse gas than you get when you landfill the material and let it produce methane for the next 20 years. Scandinavian countries, which we tend to think are on the leading edge when it comes to environmental  stewardship, use energy from waste everywhere . Only in North America is real estate plentiful enough to allow such a wasteful use of scarce farm land as landfilling. Contemplating energy from waste need not trigger an endless round of studies. Hamilton city staff have been quietly working on this problem and in  April of 2010 released a report  that demonstrated the environmental benefits of combining energy from waste with landfilling. The life of the Glanbrook  landfill site would be extended to over a hundred years if only the ash from EFW were deposited there.  New incineration technologies  produce a tiny fraction of the emissions that were produced at the old SWARU plant. As it stands, the project  could probably be paid out of private capital assuming we could take in some waste from neighbouring communities to achieve economies of scale. With a little help from the provincial government the project could be made even more financially feasible by raising the price paid for EFW by about 4 cents, which would still be about 20% of what we are paying for solar and wind power. There is simply no valid  reason, other than ideology,  to shy away from a serious discussion of this old, but new again, sustainable option for waste disposal.