The Dirty Truth About Your Rubbish: Dispatches Monday 8th March, 8pm, Channel 4

8 March 2021

Channel 4 Dispatches investigates millions of tonnes of waste we leave out for recycling actually ends up being burned, reveals which areas of the country incinerate the most. 

• We are now burning more waste than we recycle. Latest figures for England show that in 2019 11.6m tonnes of waste was incinerated while 10.9m was sent for recycling.
• Dispatches can reveal that on average 11% of the waste we put out for recycling is being incinerated.
• The total carbon emissions from incineration have now overtaken those from coal. 

Up until the mid-90s we sent 90% of our waste to landfill, a a cheap and easy way to dispose of rubbish.

The Government brought in a new tax on landfill making it much more expensive, so councils found an alternative.  The solution was ‘energy from waste’, where rubbish is burned to produce electricity.

 

Recycling/Incinerating figures

• In 2008 the Government set a target to recycle 50% of household waste by 2020, but for the past five years our recycling rate has stalled at 45%.

One of the UK’s top recycling experts has cast serious doubts on even that figure

Professor Karl Williams, Director of waste management at the University of Central Lancashire, “It’s not a true figure because when we talk about recycling rates, what we’re really talking about is collection rates. So, the way we collect recycling figures at the moment, it’s how much material we collect from the households – and that is then measured and weighed and that goes as the recycling figures.”

We sent Freedom of Information requests to every authority across the UK responsible for waste management and received responses from more than 100 councils:

• West Lothian send 27% of it’s recycling to be incinerated

Studies show that more than 50% of what we put in our residual waste could be recycled or composted if it was put in the correct bin

According to the most recent figures just 29% of all the waste collected by The North London Waste Authority is recycled – that's one of the lowest rates in the country.

 

The shift to burning more of our waste also has environmental implications.

Supporters of incineration say it’s a sustainable solution to our waste problem that diverts millions of tonnes of rubbish from landfill. 

Professor Karl Williams, “The attraction for them at the moment is we don’t have the facilities to recycle all the plastic. So currently we have a lot of material that we can’t do anything with it apart from landfill it. Therefore, it makes sense that we burn that to get some energy from it as opposed to burning other types of fossil fuel.”

But Georgia Elliott- Smith, an environmental engineer, believes more could be done to stop recyclable materials being burnt, “The reality is that about 60% of what goes into this incinerator – and every other waste incinerator in the UK – is recyclable. And so essentially what they’re burning here is valuable resources that should remain in the economy, be recycled, be reused and not be burnt. So, at the moment there are recycling targets which every local waste authority in London is failing to meet but there’s no penalty for failing to meet a recycling target.”

A former chief scientific adviser to the Department of the Environment is also concerned. Professor Boyd: “There are a lot of people who are highly incentivised to incinerate waste because of the investments we make in waste to power plants, we end up a lot of the time creating a market for waste and therefore trying to generate more waste in order to generate the input for the power plants that we’ve made such large investments in. My feeling is that we’ve got to use the capacity we have rather than create more capacity, because if you create more capacity you create more demand for materials, and that is simply cranking up the amount of material that comes into the system.”

Carbon emissions, C02, are a prime driver of climate change, which is why there has been a move away from coal-fired energy, however more energy-generating incinerators has meant they are steadily producing more C02. 

• The total carbon emissions from incineration have now overtaken those from coal. 
• Figures for 2019 show the UK’s 48 incinerators emitted a total of around 12.6m tonnes of CO2.
• In comparison the dwindling coal sector produced 11.7m tonnes of CO2

All energy producers have to publish their total carbon dioxide emissions, but the incinerating industry only have to account for the C02 from burning fossil waste like plastic. They don’t have to report emissions from sources like food and garden waste known as biogenic CO2. Environmental campaigners claim this is ‘creative carbon accounting’

Georgia, “At the moment waste incinerators are completely excluded from any kind of carbon tax. They don’t pay any tax on the fuel that they receive, which is the waste, and they pay no tax on the emissions that they create, so they have this double economic benefit which makes it really nice and cheap and profitable.”

 

The Eunomia report:

Dispatches have been given exclusive access to the Eunomia report, commissioned by the environmental law charity Client Earth, one of UK’s leading environmental consultancies. It raises major concerns over future emissions from incinerators. 

• Producing electricity from waste is more carbon intensive than producing it from gas – and second only to coal.
• When coal is phased out, incineration will become the dirtiest form of electricity production in the UK
• The analysis found that over the next 15 years there’ll be a big change in the make-up of our waste stream, there’ll be less materials like cardboard, paper and food waste because new regulations mean more of those will be recycled and composted.
• Every tonne of waste sent for incineration will contain a higher proportion of plastics.
• By 2035 incineration will become a more carbon intensive process than even landfill.

Figures also show a direct correlation between areas which invested in incinerators and who are now struggling to raise their recycling rates.

• The UK’s South West has the second lowest rate of incineration at 34% and the highest rate of recycling 49.3%.
• London has the highest rate of incineration 61% and the lowest rate of recycling
• Newham Council in East London has the second lowest recycling rate in the country at just 20.3%. It has admitted it is ‘tied into an expensive and inflexible waste disposal Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract until 2027 that limits our ability to improve recycling performance’

 

Right to reply:

The Government says it will introduce new taxes aimed at reducing the amount of unrecyclable plastic entering the waste stream, which will cut the amount of fossil fuels being incinerated and increase plastic recycling rates.   It is also introducing a new Environment Bill making its way through Parliament aimed at transforming the waste sector and how we recycle.  In a statement it said: 'This will reduce waste and strengthen our fight against plastic pollution. We are very clear that incineration should be a last resort behind recycling and re-use – but using waste to generate energy is preferable to dumping rubbish in landfill for future generations to deal with. ‘Our reforms will make recycling much simpler for households and industry. Measures include consistent collections and encouraging manufacturers to make their products more recyclable.”

 

The Dirty Truth About Your Rubbish: Dispatches Monday 8th March, 8pm, Channel 4

A Below The Radar production for C4

Producer/Director: Andrew Pugh

Executive Producer: Michael Fanning

REPORTER: LUCY SIEGLE