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Your islandYou are in: Jersey > People > Your island > Sustainability versus a new incinerator  Sustainability versus a new incineratorBy Speakers Corner Contributor, Nick Palmer In this Speakers Corner article, Nick Palmer explains why he thinks the incinerator is a bad idea. Speakers Corner is a feature of bbc.co.uk/jersey that gives users the opportunity to have their say on subjects that matter to them.They write an article for us, we publish it and then open it up for people to comment and share their own opinions on the original story.This Speakers Corner article is by Nick Palmer. Over two features Nick looks at the planned incinerator at La Collette, explains why he thinks it is a bad idea and suggests alternatives.Sustainability versus a new incineratorThis two part article firstly shows why Transport and Technical Services’ (TTS) plan to buy another incinerator is hopelessly inappropriate, as is their recycling target, and sketches out why Jersey needs to pay far more attention to sustainable development than it currently does. In part two, I suggest smaller, cheaper, much more flexible alternatives to a new incinerator that do not threaten the La Collette skyline or the growth of recycling and also hold out the prospect of revitalising our struggling agricultural industry and shrinking Jersey’s carbon footprint to boot! TTS have simply stonewalled all the valid 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.  They threaten us that unless we buy a huge new incinerator soon that the existing one will break down more and more often and it will cost us more because incinerator prices are escalating rapidly. Clearly they are only thinking and planning within a “waste disposal problem” framework and their recycling target is surely just a concession to the public’s desire to recycle. Their prediction that they can achieve a 32 % recycling rate, recently revised to 36% by 2018, is mated with their simplistic, speculative 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. Incinerators are diametrically opposed to any worthwhile environmental strategy to achieve a sustainable civilisation in the future because they depend on the burning of otherwise recyclable material. SustainabilitySustainability is the key concept that is missing from their position, and indeed that of the States as a whole. The world needs it and Jersey has committed itself to it but it seems to have been airbrushed out of the picture as far as TTS’s plans are concerned. Their recycling targets of between 32-36% are simply not good enough. Friends of the Earth reckon that around 80% of waste is currently recyclable let alone what will be achievable in the future as industrial infrastructure and manufacturing methods change. The Scrutiny panel have also identified much greater recycling possibilities than our modest current efforts. Maximum recycling should be the target to allow people to “learn by doing” what products favour sustainability and what do not. Knowledgeable purchasing choices will alter market forces to favour sustainability. 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 relatively clean, unpolluted and undamaged landscape, that we have a large impact per person on the World Environment. Global impactIt is Jersey’s global impact that should be the motivation for recycling and new methods of waste handling if we are ever going to have a hope of achieving a sustainable global civilisation. An environmental term has been hijacked because sustainability has been represented locally as sustaining the Jersey environment or even just the Jersey economy. This is a dangerously misleading, irresponsible and insular view. It should be clear that wealthy Jersey’s environmental impact 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 greenhouse gas emissions, as some textbooks say, but for probably 50% of them if one includes the energy needed to power the mushrooming Chinese factories that create products to supply the US market. It is logically certain that current global consumer culture has a “ best before” time limit which 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. The same goes for the resources of the biosphere, upon which our lives depend. 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?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 fundamental understanding of why they should be recycling at all. last updated: 28/05/2008 at 15:36 Have Your Say
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