From Professor Adrian Demaid.
IN the spirit of encouraging an informed debate, by people concerned with our environment, I welcome Nick Palmer’s response to my letter (JEP, 17 December) on why burning waste is environmentally friendly.

Nick argues, along with taking pot shots at the messenger rather than the message, that the problem is complex – like chess. The complexity of chess is created by very simple rules easily executed on a computer – waste management for the good of our environment is very much simpler than chess.

Where the UK is, at the moment, is that waste management systems have been created by dictat and financial subsidy in a way that beggars belief. Essentially, a cottage industry has been created to solve an industrial-scale problem. An army of unpaid householders in the UK sort their rubbish at an ever finer scale to supply raw materials to councils who sell them on to industries perceived to be desperate for more and more raw materials.

Unfortunately the industries that require our yogurt pot tops – yes, unpaid householders in some areas of the UK are required to separate the tops from the tubs – are mostly in China and they no longer pay top dollar for Hertfordshire’s yoghurt top mountain. What’s even worse is that cheap-as-chips containers (the big steel ones, not the plastic yoghurt tubs) are not flooding back to China anymore.

In response, councils in the UK are closing their so-called recycling centres at a great rate – down by nearly a half in some areas – and looking around for land on which to store waste sorted by their cottage industry labourers. Plans afoot to impose fines on sustainability dissenters reinforce the cottage industry analogy.
What to do?

The answer, as expert evidence from a major engineering institution in the UK presented to MPs this month argues, is to deal with waste as locally as possible – in the case of newly unwanted paper and plastic that means use this raw material as a fuel to produce useful electricity and heat. Unfortunately there are a limited number of such local facilities because the wilder shores of the environmental movement have claimed the moral high ground for too long.

Jersey is behind the bleeding edge of this euro-nonsense and we can learn from the errors of others. So, the idiocy of shipping combustibles around the world, while arguing that this minimises our ecological footprint, when they can be used to generate energy locally must surely come naturally to Islanders.

The return of common sense to waste management strategies is moving apace, so I am afraid that a lot more messengers will need to be shot before this problem unwinds.
4 Clos de la Tour,
La Rocque,
Grouville.