Energy From Waste

Posted By: William Hobhouse
Date Posted: 04/11/2009

Residents like their councillors to have jobs in the real world. This diary is from that real world.

There are no state owned landfill sites left in Greater Manchester. That’s one of the reasons we have to recycle, but that still leaves about 70% of our waste looking for a solution that isn’t landfill. One solution is energy from waste, burning waste and generating heat and electricity for re-use. If we are to do this in the North West, we have to work with the big industrial energy users. We need to offer alternatives to these companies buying in millions of pounds of gas each year.
Burning our waste can do that. The downside is that it needs millions of pounds worth of investment in new boilers. This is clearly the job of national, regional and local government to facilitate. It’s the job of banks to lend. If done properly, landfill reduces, capital investment increases, and big manufacturing companies become better tied into the local and regional economy.

These are the sorts of strategic economic decisions government at all levels should be taking. However, the decisions are often painfully slow, often taken years later than they should be, paralysed by government bureaucracy or failures in the banking system.
How often do we hear of recyclable waste being loaded on to containers and shipped abroad to China? That’s because we haven’t sufficiently linked our local industries (for example the chemicals or paper industries) into the local economy. We can be sidetracked by market deregulation and a compartmentalising of decisions each with their own separate priorities.

At times of recession, the local and regional linkages are the way we retain and grow our manufacturing base in the UK. This is what the Lib Dems call green investment.