Your island

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 incinerator

TTS have a naïve and shallow waste-management strategy - recycle one third, burn the rest and get a fraction of the embodied energy back. How ridiculous!

There is simply no point in a waste handling strategy that produces a few saleable materials and some energy on the side if it is unrelated to an overall plan to achieve global sustainability, environmentally and economically.

The true environmental pay off will be when people start to demand better designed products that create less waste in manufacture, that are long lived, repairable and ultimately recyclable.

Home based separation of waste is an ideal way of starting to become aware what the worst products are environmentally and the best sustainable choices to make when buying new products. If two thirds of waste is burned because of TTS’s dead end strategy, no-one is going to learn much worth knowing.

So what would be my suggestion for an alternative to a new incinerator?

Firstly, the Scrutiny panel are claiming that there are sufficiently developed markets for recycled materials right now and that we can make a large dent in the amount of waste going for final disposal and generate quite a lot of money back too.

While such markets have been rather unstable in the past, the astonishingly quick sea change in the views of governments, large corporations and the people about Green matters over the last year or two screams that we are now entering into a new era.

The environmental snowball has finally started to roll. We should take advantage of these markets as they open up and aim for maximum recycling.

Secondly, I recognise that because we live in an Island, we may need some form of residual waste processing technology for the next decade or so.

Multi-module technology

I propose that we choose one of the newer, much smaller, (slightly) cleaner multi module technologies, such as pyrolysis/gasification, as a stop gap.

TTS have excluded them from consideration because they have not been commercially proven on municipal waste for long enough to satisfy them as to their reliability.

These plant have, however, proved themselves very well commercially on clinical waste – indeed John Richardson, TTS’s Chief Executive Officer suggested to me, in a phone conversation, that he would consider replacing our current clinical waste plant with one.

“Bureaucratic and semantic”

The problem with TTS’s objection is that it is a bureaucratic, almost semantic, one. It barely matters, to pyrolysis plants, what the feedstock is as long as it has hydrogen and carbon compounds in it.

Whether it is clinical or municipal waste is practically the same. TTS’s exclusion clauses would be relevant for a new design of incinerator but do not apply to pyrolysis/gasification.

These plant have the massive advantage that they can be converted to other uses, module by module, if the supply of waste starts to slow, then stabilise and finally shrink, as it must. They can even be sold on as they are relatively easy to move. 

Maintenance is far easier as only a small fraction of the total capacity needs to be shut down at any one time. We would not need massive overcapacity to insure against breakdowns.

They are more flexible in exactly the same way that a fleet of cars is more effective for a taxi service than one large coach.

Multiple locations

The small modules do not even need to all be in one location so a large “waste to energy” plant site would not be compulsory. La Collette would retain its current skyline at the “gateway to Jersey” and the JEC chimney would not be needed and could even be removed.

Without further cost, modules could directly replace the ageing clinical waste incinerator plant at Bellozanne, due for replacement in about 10 years, and also be used as biomass fuelled combined power and heat generators.

Fields of elephant grass or short rotation coppiced willow will provide a new horizon for our struggling farmers to supply a biomass energy industry.

I have been in close contact with a researcher at Dublin University who has investigated scientifically the clearly beneficial energy balance of these crops - so superior to that of corn based ethanol which is currently destabilising world food prices.

Our fossil fuel imports would be reduced. A module installed at the Hospital to replace their boiler could supply their total electrical and heating needs… but there is more.

Such modules initially produce syngas which can be stored before it is used to generate power, not necessarily in the same place but anywhere there is a need for power – this could be a large office building or hotel.

Even more unusually, these modules can produce what is known as biochar which is a form of charcoal that can be incorporated into agricultural soils (the result is known as “terra preta”).

This enables crop growth with much reduced fertiliser inputs and less leaching of nutrients. The manufacture and use of artificial fertiliser is a significant source of greenhouse gases.

The production and use of biochar from biomass is actually carbon negative, not merely zero carbon, atmospherically speaking. No incinerator can even approach this flexibility.

The people of Jersey have a choice – go with yesterday’s men and support TTS’s rush to get another incinerator or choose a strategic stepping stone towards a sustainable future by selecting an extremely flexible multi-module multi-use alternative that just happens to be considerably smaller and cheaper as well.

More and more people are waking up to the need to protect our future by modifying our present choices and I call on TTS to review their fixed ideas on dealing with waste in the limited way most familiar to them and instead for them to embrace the future of environmentally sustainable development. Or get out of the way.