From Nick Palmer.
PROFESSOR Demaid (JEP, 18 February) once again asserts that incineration is mostly better than recycling.

He is clearly against any attempt to revisit the misguided States decision to commission another incinerator and uses his professorial title to add gravitas to his position.

This is ironic because it was John Mulready, then chief officer of Public Services, who subsequently became a professor, who famously influenced the States not to install gas cleaning equipment at Bellozanne in the 1990s, when the incinerator could no longer meet EU standards on pollutants, by using statements such as that dioxins were no problem because their concentration was like ‘a sugar cube in Loch Ness’.

Scientific opinion continued to move against Prof Mulready, and now we see his former department acknowledging that Bellozanne is a health hazard that should have been closed down years ago.
So much for professorial advice and foresight!

The Life Cycle Analyses that he claims support his view, do not. The latest scientific studies from the Waste Resources and Action Programme, which is a government-funded body, state that ‘most studies show that recycling offers more environmental benefits and lower environmental impacts than other waste management’.

That seems clear enough, but these studies, where they examine waste incineration, assume it would be replacing landfill, which emits the powerful greenhouse gas methane. If the States are minded to listen to this method of evaluating recycling versus incineration for our local situation, they must realise that some factors don’t apply here as we have been incinerating our waste resources for 30 years — we don’t landfill waste, just ash, so we don’t have any methane emissions to be displaced. Furthermore, any electricity from the new incinerator would only displace low-carbon electricity imported from the French grid and not any greenhouse gas-creating fossil-fuelled generation, as would be the case in the UK.

As these two important factors do not apply in Jersey, incineration here must come out as vastly inferior to most recycling, probably all. Incinerators have recently been refused planning permission in the UK on climate change grounds as not being the best available technique — how much poorer would they come out locally if we had up-to-date environmental impact assessments done?

The professor claims that ‘the devil is in the detail’. Well, the even bigger devil is in the omitted factors in simple LCAs such as that global manufacturer-led initiatives to redesign, reduce, re-use and use more recycled ma- terial will imminently change the dynamics of material use or re-use and transform the generation and handling of waste.

A single-unit single-technology incinerator will surely be obsolete a few years after it is commissioned. We cannot even call it an ‘energy from waste’ plant, as it has been consistently represented to the public, because it is not efficient enough to be classified as such by the EU, which classifies plant of this size as merely disposal plant.
Winterwood,
Rue des Hamonnets,
St Lawrence.