Incineration and the future of waste

Today I was at a seminar on "waste to energy", otherwise known as incineration.

It was quite surreal. Listening to great speakers from the US and UK (and they were excellent - thank you) on video-conference, in a packed room (had to be well over one hundred there), I couldn't help the feeling that I was watching the justification of mainframe computing in a personal computer era.

You see, the presentations were all about how incineration is fine environmentally etc. I get that environmental and health factors concern people. It's easy to get frightened of the "pollution factory" down the road, especially when you can't see the pollution. But I don't think this is the problem with incineration.

For mine, the problem with incineration centres on its philosophy of bulking everything into a furnace and then cleaning up the back end. In doing this, you pretty much have to cater for the worst case.This is expensive. And the best fuel (plastic, timber, cardboard) is so easily recycled through much cheaper avenues. You are desperately vulnerable.

So the problem becomes how do you finance these things? Especially now in the post GFC world where banks are risk averse (!?). Incinerators are immense capital investments (several hundred million dollars just to build) that require waste feed secured over decades. And that, to me, is why incineration will fail.

It is no accident that incinerators are only built when underpinned by government. This might be finance, subsidies or waste feed,or more likely all of the above. Absent one, the business case gets very dicey. Large mixed waste incinerators are not built commercially.

Commercial incinerators do exist, but they are smaller and focused on a specific waste stream. Why? Because it requires less pollution control, feedstock is more secure and the business case is stronger.

But it comes back to this. Why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars on technology that is forever at risk of new pollution control standards, when you can invest a few million and make a highly focused plant hum. A portfolio of these little plants dealing with discrete parts of the waste stream - now there's a business I'd want to build!