I have visited one Incinerator at Heath Road Hospital and one MBT Plant at Donarbon in Cambridge http://www.donarbon.com/  How sad can you get?

Our visit to Donarbon in Cambridge was interesting.  The plant is still in its test phase prior to handover but was clean tidy, except for the festoons of video tape and from the outside looked like any other modern industrial building.  

Cambridge re-cycles high portion of waste through Peterborough and GT Blakenham.  It treats garden waste by windrow composting and kitchen waste by in vessel composting.  The output is sold to farmers and gardeners as the process is certified safe. 

Their “black bin” residual waste is processed by an MBT (Mechanical Biological Treatment) plant to avoid paying LATS (Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme) penalties by stabilising the waste, reducing biological activity by 70%, as measured by oxygen take up.  Suffolk has never appeared clear that this is so but it is:  I checked the regulations.  MBT plant output can be stabilised waste or refuse derived fuel that can be sold.  We were that there is a market and this fuel and it is classed biomass as recyclate has been removed before burning takes place. 

The cost of the MBT plant is about £40 M under a PFI.  Suffolk’s large mass burn Incinerator (sorry, Energy from Waste Plant) will cost a lot more in a 30 year £600 M PFI contract.  Expensive flue gas clean up is required as black bin waste has a number of contaminants that must be extracted from the flue gas to tight EU regulations.  (Three chears for the European Union).  We were told that the best way to build a mass burn system is to go through MBT first taking the pollutants out before burning rather than spend a fortune extracting them afterwards. 

Ironically the number of large incinerators built is causing a shortage of waste and Incinerator operators in Europe are importing waste at Euro 20 per tonne to keep the beast running.

Food for thought!