Tips for the future as rubbish turns into a burning issue
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Rubbish used to be something we put in a black bag and forgot about, but suddenly we're all interested in where our waste goes.
Five years ago, Tony Sharkey would tell people he was in waste management and watch their eyes glaze. Now they want to discuss one of the great issues of politics... summed up, in the rubbish problem, in a form we can all understand. Global warming aside, just look at all that waste! We were just waiting to be asked to start composting and bottle-banking.
Now we are impatient for the powers- that-be to make some more spectacular efforts. And Mr Sharkey and his colleagues are about to demonstrate some possibilities. He is head of Future Technology for Yorwaste – an unusual kind of company, because its shareholders are two local authorities.
It was set up by North Yorkshire County Council, in 1993, in response to government demands for a clear division between the business of waste disposal and the policing of it. Many authorities hired private contractors. North Yorkshire set up Yorwaste to act as an arm's-length management company for its tips – bidding for the handling of waste from the district councils, which empty the bins, and picking up other business where possible, but returning any profits to the taxpayers' coffers. York Council bought into the idea when York went independent and both councils are represented on the Yorwaste board.
It sounds like a recipe for caution and for a while, Yorwaste did more or less what the council department it was formed from would have done. But it has had to respond to the new priorities created by the global warming panic. And in the past two months, it has made two announcements which were international news in waste management.
The first was a go-ahead for an adventurous new kind of waste-processor on a reclaimed section of tip at Seamer Carr, on the edge of Scarborough. It's the kind of demonstration project, for the region and the country, which Yorkshire Forward and Defra both want to see, and they have been talked into paying nearly half the cost. Everybody wants to stop you calling it an incinerator.
For one thing, the rubbish will not actually be burned. The word implies something wasteful, smoky and smelly whereas the Seamer Carr plant will be enclosed, efficient and clean. Incineration has become a derogatory word – the one used by all the people who regard the environment as their cause and rubbish disposal as the battleground. Officialdom prefers to talk about EFW, meaning energy-from-waste.
But careful words do not stop the whole idea being controversial and survivors of the long and fruitless argument over a proposed EFW plant for Hull and East Yorkshire, and the battles with Greenpeace over the existing one in Sheffield, will find it remarkable that the Seamer Carr plan gained its planning permissions without a squeak.
It should be up and operating before spring next year, processing half of the rubbish Scarborough currently sends to landfill.
read more
Five years ago, Tony Sharkey would tell people he was in waste management and watch their eyes glaze. Now they want to discuss one of the great issues of politics... summed up, in the rubbish problem, in a form we can all understand. Global warming aside, just look at all that waste! We were just waiting to be asked to start composting and bottle-banking.
Now we are impatient for the powers- that-be to make some more spectacular efforts. And Mr Sharkey and his colleagues are about to demonstrate some possibilities. He is head of Future Technology for Yorwaste – an unusual kind of company, because its shareholders are two local authorities.
It was set up by North Yorkshire County Council, in 1993, in response to government demands for a clear division between the business of waste disposal and the policing of it. Many authorities hired private contractors. North Yorkshire set up Yorwaste to act as an arm's-length management company for its tips – bidding for the handling of waste from the district councils, which empty the bins, and picking up other business where possible, but returning any profits to the taxpayers' coffers. York Council bought into the idea when York went independent and both councils are represented on the Yorwaste board.
It sounds like a recipe for caution and for a while, Yorwaste did more or less what the council department it was formed from would have done. But it has had to respond to the new priorities created by the global warming panic. And in the past two months, it has made two announcements which were international news in waste management.
The first was a go-ahead for an adventurous new kind of waste-processor on a reclaimed section of tip at Seamer Carr, on the edge of Scarborough. It's the kind of demonstration project, for the region and the country, which Yorkshire Forward and Defra both want to see, and they have been talked into paying nearly half the cost. Everybody wants to stop you calling it an incinerator.
For one thing, the rubbish will not actually be burned. The word implies something wasteful, smoky and smelly whereas the Seamer Carr plant will be enclosed, efficient and clean. Incineration has become a derogatory word – the one used by all the people who regard the environment as their cause and rubbish disposal as the battleground. Officialdom prefers to talk about EFW, meaning energy-from-waste.
But careful words do not stop the whole idea being controversial and survivors of the long and fruitless argument over a proposed EFW plant for Hull and East Yorkshire, and the battles with Greenpeace over the existing one in Sheffield, will find it remarkable that the Seamer Carr plan gained its planning permissions without a squeak.
It should be up and operating before spring next year, processing half of the rubbish Scarborough currently sends to landfill.
read more
