Leicestershire County Council are proposing a big new incinerator, possibly two, to reduce the amount of County rubbish that goes to landfill. Friends of the Earth agree that we need to drastically reduce the amount of waste going to landfill, but we believe that there are far better options than incineration.

Incineration wastes lots of valuable materials and the energy incorporated in their production, it is plagued with problems in the control of toxic emissions and it produces ash that needs to be disposed of as hazardous waste.

Friends of the Earth believe that we need tighter regulation to reduce the amount of waste that we produce in the first place, from things like unnecessary packaging.  We also believe that far more needs to be done to increase recycling rates, which lag far behind those of many other countries.  This should include measures to force manufacturers to make their products more easy to recycle.

There will, of course, still be some unsorted waste, but there are better technologies than incinerstion for dealing with this, such as mechanical and biological treatment. MBT allows further valuable materials to be recovered and produces compost from the food and garden waste component.  A fairly basic MBT plant is used by Leicester City Council and far more sophisticated versions are now available.

Leicester FoE have been actively campaigning against the County Council's plans, working closely with Keith Kondakor, waste expert from Nuneaton Foe. Keith has used freedom of information legislation to extract documents from the County Council, which had not been shown to most councillors.  These documents show the very dubious assumptions that the plans are based on and the very biased nature of the decision making process.   Our campaign has achieved extensive coverage in the local press.  See this link for an example.

Our press releases on this subject can be viewed in the archive.

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