A stark warning from a local environmentalist
A clear example of the vanity of power, both Ministerial and bureaucratic, can be seen in Transport and Technical services (TTS) approach to replacing the waste incinerator. They have simply stonewalled all the arguments put by the Scrutiny panel, myself and others in letters both directly to themselves and Planning and Environment, and also via the JEP, against their favoured option of a new incinerator. They are steamrollering forward with their plans and are holding a gun to the Island’s head by threatening that unless we buy a huge new incinerator soon that the existing incinerator will break down more and more often. They state accurately that the level of pollution it currently emits is unacceptable, although they could seriously improve this by removing certain parts of the waste stream from being burnt in the first place. Clearly they are thinking and planning within a “waste disposal problem” framework and any recycling target that they think feasible is surely just there as a sop to the public’s desire to recycle. Their prediction that they can achieve a 32 % recycling rate is mated with a graph of future waste growth rising in a straight line as far as the 2030’s. Obviously they haven’t noticed that the world has suddenly woken up to the importance of Green matters.
I hope in this short article to show that their plan to commit us to a conventional mass burn incinerator will not only be more expensive initially than an alternative choice but will also ultimately prove extremely expensive as it becomes redundant in due course when there will no longer be sufficient burnable rubbish for fuel.
The key concept that is missing from their position is sustainability. The world needs it and Jersey has committed itself to it but it might as well not exist as far as TTS’s plans for waste are concerned. As management-speak would put it, they need to use joined up “out of the box” thinking. By their classifying the Island’s rubbish as waste they enable themselves to plan for what they see as the best way of handling waste. If they were renamed as the Resources Recovery Board then they might think inside a different, larger box. Give them responsibility for commissioning the “chess moves” that are needed to navigate our way towards a sustainable society and they would have to move out of the box altogether. So far TTS has shown no signs of doing this. Currently, Minister De Faye and his Department are still hell bent on commissioning a large new incinerator to cope with what they predicted almost four years ago will be rising waste volumes over the next 30 years. They have committed themselves to achieving a recycling rate of 32%. This is simply not good enough. Maximum recycling should be the target to both enable and encourage the changes in popular knowledge and awareness that will eventually lead towards a sustainable way of doing things. No-one should pretend that this will be a short journey and it will probably be filled with many dead ends and reversals but it has taken us over 50 years to get to our current unsustainable position since an American retailing analyst notoriously embraced the birth of consumer culture by claiming that “We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate”. Certainly within the planned lifespan of any new incinerator (30 years plus) society will have changed towards a future that will not create anywhere near as much material for final disposal. If we commission a large incinerator it will end up being massively inefficient due to being mostly underused. One lump of coal in a grate doesn’t burn too well!
It may not be immediately clear to people living in Jersey, because of our clean, unpolluted and undamaged landscape, that we have a larger impact than most on the World Environment in relation to our Island’s size and population. It is Jersey’s impact upon the World environment that should be the motivation for recycling and new methods of waste handling, not to mention all the other environmental areas that need addressing, if we are ever going to have a hope of achieving a sustainable global civilisation. Sustainability has been represented locally as sustaining the Jersey environment or even just the Jersey economy but this is a dangerously misleading and insular view. In effect, an environmental term has been hijacked to make our responsibility appear less than it really is. It is clear that wealthy Jersey’s impact upon the global environment reaches far beyond our shores in the same way that the 5% of the world’s population who live in the US are responsible not just for 25% of the world's climate emissions, as the textbooks say, but for at least 50% of them if one includes the energy needed to power the Chinese factories that churn out mass consumer goods to supply the US market. It is logically certain that the current laissez-faire global consumer culture has a time limit and that time-limit will be up when unending and expanding consumption of the resources available to that culture causes those resources to become scarcer and harder to find so that they become priced out of the market and effectively unavailable. Sustainable development allows us to continue creating wealth and employment without sacrificing the future of the younger generations who, ironically, are amongst those most targeted by the siren voices of ever increasing marketing and consumerism.
I challenge TTS to consider this question – why bother recycling anything at all? The real motivation for recycling schemes should be as part of the move towards a sustainable society by recovering materials that would be otherwise incinerated or land-filled so that less needs to be extracted from globally shrinking reserves. By putting forward their tiny and pointless recycling target of 32% they might as well not bother - there is no point in jumping one third of the way over the gulf towards a sustainable approach – we would be better off just saving the time and money and thereby condemn future generations to resource scarcity a little bit earlier but just as certainly. Clearly, TTS still have no understanding of why they should be recycling at all despite the fact that I told Minister Guy de Faye exactly why when I met him on a bus in May 2006.
Sustainable development recognises that we have limited space and resources and it is crucial that people start to see how true this is because there is a rather strange belief by some that we cannot possibly affect the environment of Earth deleteriously because we’re so puny and the earth is so large. A few simple figures will give an idea how dangerously crowded Earth has become. Using the current world population figure of 6.6 billion, our personal environmental land space is now down to 150 metres square (164 yards square) per person. In the 1960’s this figure was 220 yards square per person. If one imagines that our personal share of Earth’s atmosphere, land and oceans is a “spaceship” within which we each metaphorically have to live our lives, use energy, manufacture goods, dispose of waste, extract minerals, raise cattle, grow food, catch fish and dissipate pollution and cumulative pesticides etc then the figures are these: our individual atmosphere is a globe 1.1km across within which we have a piece of Earth’s surface 277 metres square (of which 70% would be ocean). This stark reality should make it clear why the total number of people multiplied by their individual impacts on the planet has now brought us to the point where we can put up a “House full” notice on the planet. There may be no more room left for more unsustainable development. Some said that the only hope of stabilising population eventually (at around 11 billion) is for Western style living (with its low birth rate) to spread to the rest of the world. Rough calculations have suggested that if the whole world had a standard of living like the US we would need more than ten Earths worth of resources to supply it. Similarly, for Europe it would average at around three Earths. Jersey’s high average standard of living would need maybe 5 planets worth. A sustainable world is not an option, it is an imperative and it is a shame that this big idea has been virtually airbrushed out of current political thinking locally.
And now we come back to TTS’s naïve and shallow waste-management strategy - recycle one third, burn the rest and get a fraction of the embodied energy back. How ridiculous! There is simply no point in a waste handling strategy that produces a few saleable materials and some energy on the side if it is unrelated to an overall plan to achieve global sustainability, environmentally and economically. The amount of energy recovered in “energy from waste” incinerators is vastly smaller than the energy used to resource and manufacture the original goods. Similarly, any recycled saleable materials in no way equate to the mountains of materials that were originally used to manufacture those products that are now called waste. Also, the amount of landscape and habitat saved by having an efficient waste disposal method locally is in no way comparable to the land scarred and habitats damaged by the original extraction of the raw materials. The true environmental pay off will be when people start to demand better designed products that create less waste in manufacture, that are long lived, repairable and ultimately recyclable. Home based separation of waste is an ideal way of starting to become aware what the worst products are environmentally and the best sustainable choices to make when buying new products. If two thirds of waste is burned because of TTS’s dead end strategy, no-one is going to learn anything worth knowing.
So what would be my suggestion for an alternative to a new incinerator? Firstly, the Scrutiny panel are claiming that there are sufficiently developed markets for recycled materials right now and that we can make a very large dent in the amount of waste going for final disposal and generate quite a lot of money back too. While such markets have traditionally been rather unstable, the astonishingly quick sea change in the views of governments, large corporations and the people about Green matters over the last year or two screams that we are now entering into a new era. The environmental snowball has finally started to roll. We should take advantage of these markets as they open up and aim for maximum recycling. Friends of the Earth claim that around 80% of waste is recyclable now. Secondly, I recognise that because we live in an Island, we may need some form of bulk waste processing technology for the next decade or so. I propose that we choose one of the newer, much smaller, (slightly) cleaner multi module technologies, such as pyrolysis/gasification, as a stop gap. These have the massive advantage that they can be converted to other uses, module by module if the supply of waste starts to slow, then stabilise and finally shrink as it must. They can even be sold on as they are relatively easy to move. Maintenance is far easier as only a small fraction of the total capacity needs to be shut down at any one time. Similarly, breakdowns are far less of a crisis. They are more flexible in exactly the same way that a fleet of cars is more effective for a taxi service than one large coach. The small modules do not even need to all be in one location so a large “waste to energy” plant site would not be compulsory. La Collette would retain its current skyline at the “gateway to Jersey”. The JEC chimney would not be needed and could be removed. Without further cost, modules could directly replace the ageing clinical waste incinerator plant at Bellozanne and also be used as biomass fuelled combined power and heat generators. Fields of elephant grass or short rotation coppiced willow could provide a new horizon for our beleaguered farmers to aim towards by creating a biomass energy industry free from the highly dubious energy balance of ethanol biofuel that is currently raising world food prices. Our fossil fuel imports would be reduced. A module installed at the Hospital to replace their boiler could supply their total electrical and heating needs… but there is more. Such modules initially produce syngas which can be stored before it is used to generate power, not necessarily in the same place but anywhere there is a need for power – this could be a large office building or hotel. Even more unusually, these modules can produce what is known as biochar which is a form of charcoal that can be incorporated into agricultural soils (the result is known as “terra preta”) which enables crop growth with much reduced fertiliser inputs and less leaching of nutrients. The manufacture and use of artificial fertiliser is a significant source of greenhouse gases. The production and use of biochar from biomass can actually be carbon negative not merely zero carbon, atmospherically speaking.
The people of Jersey have a choice – go with yesterday’s men and support TTS’s rush to get another incinerator or choose a strategic stepping stone towards a sustainable future by selecting an extremely flexible multi-module multi-use alternative that just happens to be considerably smaller and cheaper as well. More and more people are waking up to the need to protect our future by modifying our present choices and I call on TTS to review their fixed ideas on dealing with waste in the limited way most familiar to them and instead for them to embrace the future of environmentally sustainable development. Or get out of the way.
Nick Palmer