Dirty Technologies Can't Clean Up the Mess

In the face of the climate crisis, incinerator and landfill industries are trying to shed their dirty reputations and increase their profits by “greenwashing” waste disposal - falsely painting it as a source of renewable energy. 

Using names like waste-to-energy, gasification, plasma, and methane capture, waste disposal companies have gained access to billions of dollars in public money meant for renewable energy projects. This encourages the construction and expansion of expensive, pollution-ridden, and climate-changing waste projects and obstructs community-based efforts to reduce waste and stop global warming.

The truth is that incinerators emit more greenhouse gases per unit of electricity generated than coal-fired power plants. And landfills are the largest source of methane - a global warming gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Even worse, incinerators and landfills feed on materials that we should be recycling or composting - like paper, food waste, plastic, and aluminum. In fact, their entire existence depends on wasting materials that can be recycled, reused, or otherwise reduced in the first place.

Unfortunately, instead of funding waste reduction, composting, and recycling programs, many public bodies are now subsidizing incinerators and mega-landfills. For example, the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol – the world’s primary funding mechanism for climate-friendly projects – is heavily invested in landfills and incinerators. 

We can and must do better. With limited resources to fix the climate problem, no public money should be wasted on climate cons like incinerators and landfills.