Incinerators are ludicrously expensive. The capital costs between the eighties and today have risen by at least £80,000,000 [even in 1983, a 1500 ton per day facility with only a three field electrostatic precipitator for air pollution control cost about £100,000,000], largely due to increased pollution controls [as an example, the cost of just a working flue gas treatment for the incinerator at the University of Heidelberg in Germany is as high as 17,000,000 DM - Source]. Even these are ineffective at stopping the worst pollutants. The costs of getting waste to these very large facilities never include the environmental factors, such as diesel pollution. Even so, just getting the waste there is expensive. So the local authority pays for that bit out of our taxes - such is the reality of "private tender".

So we finance the privately run incinerator's waste flow. How many other "private" facilities are paid to take their fuel? This also ignores the Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation [or tax], which takes yet more money from the public purse to subsidize the private power generators such as incinerators and nuclear power [little of it reaches wind and solar power companies]. Also, today's ventures will usually have been funded by the governments PFI [Private Finance Initiative], begun under the Tories and entrenched under Labour. The finance packages here often cost the local authority, and therefore us, more than building it themselves, over the lifetime of the project. The "private" company is massively subsidized by the public. And it still cannot be profitable!

Most of the money invested in the incinerator leaves the community. The huge engineering firms that build incinerators are seldom located in the host community and thus most of the little the company has had to contribute leaves the community (and the country if the company is foreign based, as they often are). Money invested in green alternatives stays in the community, creating local jobs and stimulating other community development.

The local authorities and waste companies usually claim that the plants will create jobs. In fact, very few jobs are created for this massive economic investment. They will employ about 40-60 staff, usually from out of the area, as expertise is needed. Most of the money spent is going into complicated equipment. Apart from the number of short-term jobs created in the building of the plant, very few jobs are created for locals. The knock-on effect for the local economy is negligible. On the other hand, if the community puts its efforts into source separation, reuse and repair, recycling and composting, a very large number of jobs are created, both in the actual handling of the waste and in the secondary industries which utilise the recovered material [see Viable Alternatives].

This is, of course, a global problem. Developing economies can ill afford to lose capital and local job opportunities. In 1997, authorities in the Philippines were considering ten large incinerators. The Danish company Volund offered to build a 1300 ton per day facility at the old, and infamous, Smoky Mountain dump, to burn excavated plastics from the old landfill there. An American company built a 2000 ton per day facility at the Carmona landfill, just outside Manila, and the Swiss Swedish conglomerate Asea Brown and Boveri (ABB) is involved in building a 4500 ton per day facility (which would be the largest in the world) at the San Mateo landfill. This wasteful approach is taking place against a backdrop of largely voluntary and local efforts to develop recycling and composting programs that lack financial and governmental support.

The truth is suppressed both here and in developing countries. The incinerator projects are promoted as being "privately financed"; the PR hype of "waste-to-energy" tricks many into believing that the public will not be paying for these facilities, when in fact, apart from a minimal return from energy sales the bulk of the repayment on the investment comes from the tipping fee, paid by the general public. Taxpayers usually find out true costs when it is too late. In order to pay back the massive investment involved in building an incinerator, the builder usually has to secure contracts which commit communities to deliver their trash to the facility for an extended period of time. The latter have to sign a so-called "put-or-pay" agreement. These commit communities to deliver a prescribed amount of waste to the incinerator each month or year, at a fixed rate, and should they fail to do so they have to pay the scheduled amount anyway. These contracts are often awarded before any public annoucements, applications for planning permission, or indeed private competitive tendering to other companies [and when this does happen, it often turns out that the authority has been knowingly dealing with two subsidaries of a large, usually American, company when seeking a "competitor"]. Needless to say, this is illegal on several levels.

Although the original public licensing that takes place disallows the importation of foriegn waste, it is invariably the case that the incinerator companies will quietly apply for and get permission to import at a later date. The local community is told that the very large plant is "needed" to deal with our local waste problem. But the reality is that these larger plants and the companies behind them cannot turn a penny with only local waste flow. They are almost always set up close to road and rail links that do not merely allow easy flow of local waste [which people understand] but also easy links to the continent.

As environmental controls are imposed, the costs go up, and the "profitability" of the plants becomes increasingly a matter of gaining contracts that force the loal authority to be the one that pays off any debts that occur.

Incineration is also a waste of energy. Although modern incinerators do produce saleable energy [by generating hot water, steam and/or electricity], they are reliant on receiving enough paper and plastic for it to burn without the need of any (or much) auxiliary fuel. As few communities recover energy from landfill, this energy recovery represents a potential net energy gain to the local community. Long term contracts for the sale of steam to local companies, or the national grid, are sought. In some contracts the national grid is obliged to purchase energy from incinerators.

However, the claim that municipal waste incineration is "waste-to-energy" is untrue - they produce very little energy and energy production certainly doesn't justify the huge costs involved in building them. What energy they do produce is usually used to help run the plant, keeping down the fuel bills only of the operator. While the south London based SELCHP plant has promise to heat local homes, this plan has not really come in to effect, a typical result. From a pollution perspective, the need for high calorific waste such as plastics ensures that the waste products have to be toxic. The fact that about 3% of plastics could be recycled is meaningless, though incinerator operators will often claim "green" credentials ans say they are recyling by taking out these few recyclable plastics. In fact, even these go to the burners.

"All of Japan's 193 waste-to-energy incinerators combined produce less energy than one nuclear power station and if the United States burned all its municipal waste it would contribute less than 1% of the country's energy needs. Consider these simple points:

1. A trash incinerator is the only kind of power station which gets paid to accept the fuel it burns
2. The costs of generating electricity increases significantly, as the fuel gets dirtier and trash is the dirtiest fuel burned in any "power station". Enormous amounts of money have to go into air pollution control and ash disposal, if these are done properly
3. A trash incinerator has to run for several years before there is a net production of energy. Large quantities of energy have to go into building; operating, maintaining and dismantling it after its life is over
4. The economics of paying for the building and running of an incinerator revolve around the tipping fee paid by communities to use the facility. The income from electricity sales is a minor contributor. For example a facility I visited in Poggibonzi, Italy, in 1998, was receiving 10 times more money from tipping fees than they were obtaining from the sale of electricity."

- Municipal waste incineration: A poor solution for the twenty first century, Dr. Paul Connett, 4th Annual International Management Conference 1998