Coalition for Recycling
and
Against Coventry Incinerator

1. Incineration competes with recycling
   The incineration industry and the Government argue that incineration and recycling can exist side by side. However if paper and plastic waste were minimised and recycled as much as possible, in most areas there would not be enough left to make incineration financially viable. Incinerators with long contracts, like the one proposed for Coventry, actively compete with recycling and are a barrier to waste prevention.
2. Incineration accelerates climate change
   Climate Change is now a globally accepted theorem. Coventry City Council have realised this, evident in the fact that they have produced a “Climate Change Strategy”. However they have elected to omit the climate gas emissions released by the current incinerator from the document.

   When waste is burnt in an incinerator, heat is produced which can be used to produce electricity that can be fed into the National Grid. Simplistic claims have been made that burning waste in incinerators will reduce greenhouse gas house emissions. Due to the fact that they are primarily designed to be a method of reducing waste and not to generate power, in reality incinerators are not very efficient at capturing energy from the waste they burn. 83 % of the heat produced by the incineration of waste is lost before it can be converted to useable energy.

   CO2 has been designated as the main contributory gas in the cause of climate change, not because of its potency but due to the sheer volume that is being released into the atmosphere from human activities. Incinerators release a large amount of CO2 to produce a small amount of energy. A waste to electricity incinerator actually releases 33 per cent more fossil fuel derived CO2 per unit energy produced than a gas-fired power station. To get to the point there are far more efficient and sustainable ways of producing energy than burning waste.

3. A One Billion Pound investment that ties us in until 2044
   Due to the nature of the incinerator relying on PFI money, all three councils will be locked into a financial contract until 2044. This leaves no room for manoeuvre. For instance an international agreement could be made on the abatement of climate gases that could consequently make the incinerator inoperable due to legal reasons. The councils would still have to pay the private finance companies even though no waste was being burnt. Also emerging technologies for dealing with waste could not be employed as this would take away the feed for the incinerator needed to fulfil the financial contract.

4. Recycling saves energy
   Recycling also uses energy, but overall it reduces climate emission. Recycling a used product uses far less energy than the extraction and processing of virgin materials to create a new product. For example, recycling a plastic product uses around 5 times less the amount of energy required when compared to primary production.
5. Incineration pollutes
   It has been claimed that incineration is so well monitored and the filter technology used is so good that the emissions coming out of the chimney are of no danger to human health. However, despite the filters, dioxins, heavy metals, dust particles and acid gases still escape from the chimney and into our atmosphere. Each of the pollutants can cause severe health problems including cancer, asthma and kidney disease. The communities most likely to feel the effects of the pollutants will be those in the near vicinity i.e. Stoke, Whitley and Cheylesmore.
6. Incineration of waste still leads to landfill
   One of the main arguments for pro-incineration is that it diverts waste away from landfill; but a significant amount of ash (around a third of the original waste) is produced from incineration which still has to be sent to landfill. Incinerator ash contains toxic heavy metals and dioxins. The heavy metals and dioxins within the ash are much more liable to leach than if they were in unburnt waste.
7. A waste of jobs
   Once they have been built, incinerators create few jobs compared to recycling. One example given by The British Newsprint Manufacturers Association found that recycling of newspapers would create three times more jobs as incinerating them.
8. There are alternatives to incineration
   After exhausting the amount of waste that we can reduce and recycle there will still be organic matter needing to be dealt with. This can be achieved with MBT (Mechanical and Biological Treatment). The three authorities in Coventry, Solihull and Warwick should be taking note of the MBT development in Norwich. The Biomass Energy plant proposed in Norwich uses organic matter from things like trees, timber waste, wood chips, corn, rice hulls, peanut shells, sugar cane, grass cuttings, leaves and manure and turns it into energy.