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This article was originally published on Yale Environment360.
For decades, Europe has poured millions of tons of its trash into incinerators each year, often under the green-sounding label waste to energy. Now, concerns about incineration’s outsized carbon footprint and fears it may undermine recycling are prompting European Union officials to ease their long-standing embrace of a technology that once seemed an appealing way to make waste disappear.
The EU is in the process of cutting off funding for new incinerators, but there’s little sign most existing ones currently consuming 27 percent of the bloc’s municipal waste will close any time soon. And, even without EU financial support, new plants are in the works, many in southern and eastern European countries that historically have incinerated less than long-standing waste-to-energy proponents such as Germany, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, post-Brexit Britain is c
In Europe, a Backlash Is Growing Over Incinerating Garbage
For years, European countries have built “waste-to-energy” incinerators, saying new technology minimized pollution and boosted energy production. But with increasing concern about the plants’ CO2 emissions, the EU is now withdrawing support for these trash-burning facilities.
For decades, Europe has poured millions of tons of its trash into incinerators each year, often under the green-sounding label “waste to energy.” Now, concerns about incineration’s outsized carbon footprint and fears it may undermine recycling are prompting European Union officials to ease their long-standing embrace of a technology that once seemed like an appealing way to make waste disappear.