While we favor a circular economy without landfilling or WTE/Incineration the nature of society (and consuming) does create waste that cannot be avoided or recycled. In that case waste should first be made inert, toxics destroyed, and materials and energy recovered so that landfilling, the worst option for dealing with…
One sensitivity explored the comparison of adopting a 20 vs a 100-year time horizon. This clearly highlighted the large impact of methane emissions from landfills, in accordance with the recent IPCC report’s emphasis on the urgency to reduce GHG-emissions.
Another sensitivity investigated the CO2eq savings by energy recovery. The average electricity and heat mix of the European grid (and its evolution with a higher penetration of renewables in the future) is considered as default assumption for energy substitution. A sensitivity analysis with a marginal approach has also been developed which means that processes which recover energy from waste avoid the most carbon intensive conventional power generation technologies – fossil fuel sources. This sensitivity highlights even more the great contributions of energy recovery from waste in a decarbonisation perspective.
The waste management industry has cross-industrial interlinkages by making valuable waste-derived content available to the whole economy as secondary resources for material and energy uses.
Woven into your clothes is a material that takes on many disguises. It may have the texture of wool, the lightness of linen or the sleekness of silk. It’s in two-thirds of our clothing – and yet most of us don’t even know that it’s there. It’s plastic, and it’s a big problem.
Today, about 69% of clothes are made up of synthetic fibres, including elastane, nylon and acrylic. Polyester is the most common, making up 52% of all fiber production. Plastic’s unique durability and versatility have made it indispensable to the fashion industry.
“It’s in the waistband of your jeans, your shoes, in practically everything you wear, because plastic is this miracle material,” said George Harding-Rolls, campaigns adviser at the Changing Markets Foundation, an organization that investigates corporate practices.
By hiding the real costs of landfills to the public, the true value of recycling is hidden, as well as the critical gains from avoiding environmental disasters associated with releases from waste containment. Bad decisions will follow from incorrect price signals to public decision makers when the cost of prevention cannot be compared to the future costs of managing environmental calamities.
A major cause of under-pricing landfills is the failure of landfill companies or the municipalities to account for the long-term liability of existing landfills, in contravention to the most basic rules for recognizing future costs that will be incurred by failing to act prophylactically today.
Clearly, inclusion of these liabilities on the books as required by standard accounting practice will lead to long-term costs for cities and landfill companies and will have an adverse effect on value and stock price. Current accounting of landfills must be modified to cover generational costs. This will finally give the public realistic measures of current costs vs. future risks, including future costs and future impacts on climate change.
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Determining the real-world financial risks of the current system is absolutely necessary for the public and officials to make the choices that will govern the laws on post-closure management and liability for the next generations. It is impossible to evaluate future municipal financial health without these inclusions.