From David Warr.
TODAY I stood ‘slack jawed’ in front of the ‘cathedral’ that will become the Island’s new energy from waste plant.

Here in front of me stood the consequences of the insanity of a society that wants everything for less, 365 days a year. A society that wants more and more stuff and then has to spend £110 million to burn the stuff we don’t want.

It is an immense feat of engineering and I’m in awe of mankind’s ingenuity. It will be landscaped so as to reduce its visibility from land. It will provide 10% of the Island’s electrical needs.

There seemingly isn’t one aspect of the whole project that hasn’t been considered. From outstanding worker safety to measuring the environmental impact of every single activity and on those measures alone those involved should be applauded.

But how is it that we got this far? Well, let me introduce you to a new economic tool, the Peter Body carrot.

As Mr Body so eloquently put it the whole debate on the latest retail strategy is not just a simple case of more competition and theoretical lower price, it’s a much wider issue and how right he is. I can assure your readers that there’s nothing theoretical about the £110 million energy from waste plant.

Let’s take the Peter Body imported cheaper (we hope) carrots as our example. What exactly is the saving to our society of the additional cost of disposing of all the packaging needed to maintain its shelf life when we have to spend £110 million on an incinerator to make that saving?

Compare that to our more expensive locally grown carrots from the Central Market at 20p and free compost; a saving of £109,999,999.80? – no incinerator required!

Clearly I’ve oversimplified the whole argument but that’s the point. It’s so easy to think as an individual that a saving is being made when in the grand scheme of things it is the whole of our community that pays a far bigger price.

Unfortunately the Energy from Waste plant is the summation of the consumerist society of which we are all a part in the western world.

If we don’t change our habit of wanting more stuff 365 days a year we’ll keep building these monsters. I wonder if in 50 years’ time the human race will look back and wonder what madness overtook us?