Comhar SDC Chairman’s Blog

In his latest commentary, Professor Frank Convery, Chairperson of Comhar, the Sustainable Development Council, argues that incineration should not have priority over landfill as a means of final disposal of household waste.

This commentary contains tables which do not transfer well into the blog. The full article is available on the Comhar website www.comharsdc.ie.

A detailed analysis of the private and environmental costs of landfill and incineration in the Netherlands –published in 2004 – shows that the costs for incineration are considerably higher than for landfill. More recently published work in France and Germany supports this conclusion. These costs will, of course, vary by location and should be computed to reflect local circumstances. But the evidence we have argued against an automatic and universal bias against landfill and for incineration. And, therefore, there is no a priori logic in forcing incineration of municipal waste over landfill; or charging a levy on waste going to landfill
to reflect its environmental costs, but not doing likewise for waste going to incineration. This stricture may not apply to specialised industrial and hospital wastes, for which incineration may be the only prudent option. If we insist on a higher-cost final disposal option, these additional costs will be passed onto households, either in the form of higher charges or higher taxes. If new alternatives to the two choices assessed here are to be considered, they should be subjected to a similar like-for-like analysis. Note that this is not an argument for any diminishing of effort to reduce and recycle. It addresses how most efficiently to address that fraction of household waste that must go to final disposal.