THE COPENHAGEN POST
Erica Cooperberg http://cphpost.dk/news/local/incinerators-better-landfills-recycling-loser
July 8, 2012 – 08:00
Burning rubbish provides energy for households, but also comes with a price: it makes people complacent about their trash disposal
Plans to build a new futuristic incinerator – complete with ski slope – were just too grand for the city
For the five and a half million individuals residing in Denmark, waste is a perpetual problem, but it is not one that is being ignored. However, depending on who you ask, the nation’s chosen disposal method – incineration – is either an ‘environmentally-friendly’ end station, or just a step in the right direction.
While 42 percent of Danish waste is recycled, according to official statistics, the majority, 54 percent, is burned in a process that converts waste into new forms of useful energy. In Denmark’s case, that means that instead of being sent to landfills, rubbish is burned to produce heat and electricity at what are known as waste-to-energy plants.
Amagerforbrænding, Denmark’s second-largest waste company, handles approximately ten percent of the country’s waste. That trash either winds up at one of 12 recycling stations or at its waste-to-energy plant in Amager.
Jonas Nedenskov, an engineer with Amagerforbrænding, explained that the plant incinerates over 400,000 tonnes of waste per year, which is converted into “climate-friendly energy” that supplies 120,000 households with heat in the form of forced hot water and 50,000 households with electricity.
But Amagerforbrænding isn’t just burning waste; recycling is a large part of the company’s environmental efforts, and some85 percent of the waste received at the recycling stations can be reused.
Amagerforbrænding hopes it can encourage people to recycle more. “Our task is to ensure that the collection and sorting of the many different plastics is as easy as possible,” Nedenskov said. Its latest initiative, to promote plastic recycling, is being carried out in co-operation with the city of Copenhagen.
Although incineration is a more environmentally-friendly process than landfilling, critics say it isn’t as green as its supporters make it out to be.
The process includes the emission of unhealthy toxins into the air, which is a concern to employees, the community directly surrounding the plant and the greater community.
Amagerforbrænding, according to Nedenskov, seeks to minimise the amount of toxins it releases by filtering its emissions to satisfy air quality requirements put out by environment agency Miljøstyrelsen.
But while emissions can be scrubbed, incineration’s other by-product is more difficult to deal with. After trash is burned, the leftover slag, made up mostly of metal, is unusable for anything other than road-building, contended Christian Poll of nature conservation society DN.
Essentially, the incinerators just “transform waste into concentrated material”, Poll said. “Those supporting incineration often forget to tell that story.”
While Poll agreed that incineration is “much better than landfilling, like we used 20 years ago”, Denmark should instead encourage people first and foremost to reduce the amount of waste they produce, reuse what they can, and then to recycle as much of the rest as possible.
A dispute between Amagerforbrænding and CONCITO, an environmental policy think-tank, surrounds this issue –Amagerforbrænding wishes to build a new incineration facility, while CONCITO argues that it is not entirely necessary.
While it does not support the current building proposals for the facility, CONCITO does back the facility’s overall expansion.
“We want the incinerator to be small so there’s room to make the change to recycling,” Poll said. “If it has a smaller capacity, there will be real incentives to generate less waste for incineration.”
Copenhagen’s deputy mayor for technical and environmental affairs, Ayfer Baykal (Socialistisk Folkeparti), said a compromise needs to be reached on the size of any new incinerators built in Amager. The city refused to back a loan guarantee to build two new furnaces, each capable of handling 35 tonnes of waste per hour.
“We don’t need the incinerators to be so large, because the amount of trash generated in Copenhagen is expected to fall by 20 percent in the coming years,” Baykal told Politiken newspaper.
Baykal declined to say what compromises the city hopes to make, but Mogens Lømborg of Amagerforbrænding toldPolitiken that the larger ovens would be more cost-effective in the long-run.
Currently, CONCITO is waiting to hear back from the board of Amagerforbrænding with what it hopes will be plans to include more recycling facilities.
Looking towards the future, Poll said there was reason to expect Copenhagen would continue to recycle more and incinerate less. Calling the migration from landfilling to incineration a “good step”, he said continued progress would take effort. “Everything is possible; you just have to want it.”
Not enough rubbish to go around
Jennifer Buley
July 22, 2011 – 12:00
Councils scramble for foreign rubbish to fuel nation’s waste-to-energy incinerators
They say that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. In Denmark, one man’s waste is another man’s warmth – and there isn’t enough of it to go around.
Denmark leads most EU countries in municipal waste incineration for energy and heating. The country’s state-of-the-art incineration plants convert burnable household waste into the energy that heats up people’s homes, while filtering out a high percentage of the poisons and preventing 95 percent of all waste from ending up in a landfill.
Because of the popularity of this model, however, a number of communities are having trouble getting their hands on enough rubbish to feed the furnaces – and that is pressing more and more councils to import burnable foreign waste.
Three months ago, Nykøbing Falster in southern Zealand became the first Danish council to begin importing German garbage for incineration as it was not getting sufficient burnable rubbish from Zealand itself to run its incinerators efficiently.
The problem is even bigger in more rural areas, including much of Jutland, where concentrations of people are not large enough to produce enough waste to run the incineration plants. Several Jutland plants therefore plan to begin importing rubbish from Great Britain to make up for chronic garbage shortages.
Yet despite the shortage of homegrown burnable waste, thirteen Jutland councils are now weighing the possibility of building a new mega-sized incineration plant in Kjellerup, between Viborg and Silkeborg.
To run the new waste-to-energy plant thousands of truckloads of foreign rubbish may have to be imported from Germany and Great Britain. That has led critics to question the intelligence of the project.
“What’s about to happen is socio-economically stupid,” Palle Mang, managing director for Nomi, a waste management company in Holstebro, told Jyllands-Posten newspaper. “For a start, there’s not enough rubbish to ensure a sufficient supply for the incineration plants that already exist. If the plant in Kjellerup is built, we will come up short another 190,000 tonnes [of rubbish].”
Nomi is currently sourcing 4,000 tonnes of rubbish each month from outside the council just to keep its smaller incineration facility running.
But Flemming Christensen, managing director of the council-owned waste management company behind the Kjellerupproject, says that is just fine.
“I don’t see any problem with importing rubbish. It’s a really good idea to use rubbish for fuel. In that way we can reduce carbon dioxide emissions and help our neighbouring countries at the same time,” he said.
But the quality of the rubbish that is imported – as well as the distance and means by which it travels to get to the incinerator – will also have a big impact on whether carbon dioxide emissions are reduced or raised.
A recent study from the Technical University of Denmark revealed that high plastic levels in Danish household waste are the culprit for much higher carbon dioxide emissions from incineration practices than previously estimated.
The 13 councils are scheduled to meet about the proposed mega-incinerator project on September 1
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