Comment: Think outside the box to cut waste

The Argus's award-winning environmental reporter SARAH LEWIS asks the burning question: why we are losing time arguing over incineration when we could be pioneers in environmentally friendly waste management?

For years we have ignored the problem of our waste, burying it under pristine land and waiting for it to rot down into a putrid, toxic mess, pretending all the while that the green grass on top means everything is just dandy.

Now it has become apparent that we cannot keep doing this, that the poisonous liquid leachate and greenhouse gases landfill produce are not in keeping with our shiny new collective environmental conscience.

But instead of looking at the whole process of waste generation, asking why we produce so much, why such large amounts of it are polluting and non-reusable, we are simply being asked to accept another method of sweeping it all under the carpet. Incineration is wildly unpopular, and with very good reason. Quite simply, it is an inappropriate and dangerous solution to a needless problem.

The answer to what we do with all this rubbish is astonishingly easy: stop producing it in the first place.

Once we have cut our waste to the bare minimum, the next obvious step is recycling, but we even fall at this hurdle, with appallingly low recycling rates, a patchy service across Brighton and Hove and widespread confusion about what can and can't go in the box.

And even if we did manage this, would it negate the need for an incinerator?

New Zealand provides a wonderful example of how to deal with rubbish. Thanks in large part to a charitable organisation called the Zero Waste New Zealand Trust, 51 of the 71 councils in the country - more than 70 per cent - have adopted a target of sending zero waste to landfill by 2015.

Opotiki is a small town on the eastern bay of North Island. It has only 9,000 residents but 30,000 visitors annually. Since 1999, Opotiki District Council has successfully diverted 90 per cent of their waste stream from landfill.

They do this primarily through recycling, but also by not producing goods which cannot be reused for something else. All plastic is recycled. Everything that isn't recycled is reused. The area's three "resource recovery centres", which sort waste then sell it on, cost $950,000 to run and make in excess of $1 million annually.

The remaining ten per cent still makes a considerable impact on the land. About 1,000 tonnes of waste finds its way into landfill, only about 125 tonnes of which is compostable organic materials.

The council is waiting for new waste regulations and levies to take effect to invest in environmentally and socially viable ways of dealing with those final few per cent. New Zealand does not have any municipal waste incinerating plants.

On the other hand, here in Sussex we have a policy which allows us to pretend we can carry on as we are, wantonly consuming more and more pointless stuff without a single thought about what happens when we blindly drop ever increasing amounts of rubbish in the bin.

With the county council's help we could have been the first zero waste county in the UK.

Instead of simply setting light to everything we don't want, like firehappy hooligans, we could have a waste policy that gradually reduces the amount of stuff we have to put in the bin. A policy that promotes recycling to the 60 and 70 per cent levels of Germany, Italy and even Los Angeles, America. The Newhaven incinerator has been argued over since 2000. During the last eight years thousands of tonnes of waste has been sent to landfill.

Instead of spending our time and money rowing over a deeply unpopular project, our leaders could have very easily spent those years developing a genuinely sustainable policy to considerably reduce waste, to ensure our food doesn't arrive hermetically sealed in layers of non-recyclable plastic and that there are adequate facilities for everyone county-wide to recycle.

The idea that incinerators produce environmentally friendly energy is fallacious in the extreme, despite the attempt to rebrand, using the much more jolly moniker "waste-to-energy facilities".

Waste is not a renewable resource. Burning waste leaves intensely dangerous by-products which cannot possibly justify the electricity we get out.

Creating the waste in the first place uses non-renewable materials and non-sustainable methods.

Incineration itself creates ash which in turn needs to be landfilled and is even more harmful than the original ingredient.

West Sussex County Council has the opportunity to make a choice where East Sussex has failed.

Choose an expensive, polluting, unpopular and fundamentally unsustainable method of dealing with our waste problem - or pick a simple, clean, planet and people friendly one.

To burn or not to burn? Join the debate below.