In his article on Vienna's Spittelau incinerator, Frank McDonald portrays the facility as a sort of eco-friendly Disneyland, complete with cartoon "green monsters" to instil civic pride in younger generations. Many environmentalists will share my disappointment that someone who has been a pioneer on green issues has become so enthralled by the incineration fantasy. The occasional lapse of judgment is perhaps understandable, but his selective use of facts is less forgivable.
There is no mention of the fire in Spittelau in 1987 which could have had catastrophic consequences for nearby residents had the oil tanks exploded. Nor does he explain that Vienna has two municipal incinerators, one in Spittelau, the other in Floetzersteig.
Because of the strong anti-incineration lobby, Floetzersteig is now required to produce soil samples from the area to determine the real level of pollutants. Consequently, local residents have been warned not to eat certain produce grown in their gardens. Surely the fact that dioxins cannot be measured continuously ought to be seen as a fault and not a virtue?
Frank McDonald informs us that parts of the toxic ash are dumped in a salt mine. Yes, but the salt mine is in Heilbronn in Germany, and the costs involved in exporting the waste are exorbitant. There has never been a satisfactory answer from the Irish authorities in relation to the disposal of toxic ash.
The Austrian anti-incineration movement have also expressed fears about the clinker mixed with cement in Rautenweg. They state it is only a matter of time before these highly toxic substances leach into the environment.
Finally, the claim that incineration in Vienna has not acted as an impediment to recycling bears little relation to the facts, according to my sources in the Green Movement in Austria. Separated waste, due to be recycled, has been finding its way into incinerators because of the economic need for incinerators to operate at maximum capacity at all times.
Austria is not alone in having an anti-incineration movement. Last month, Mr Ludwig Kraemer, head of the EU Waste Management Directorate, revealed that Europe is moving to phase out incinerators.
"In France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany and Portugal, no more new incinerators are being built because the public will not stand for them. They are treated in the same way as nuclear power," he said.
Interestingly, arguments by the nuclear industry that radiation is naturally occurring and that nuclear power does not add significantly to it are now being used by the incineration industry in relation to dioxins. When the draft Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on the dangers of dioxins was leaked to the American media, the incinerator lobby and our own Minister for the Environment immediately played down the issue by claiming that dioxins are created when you burn leaves in your back garden or when you light a cigarette. Are we therefore supposed to ignore the main findings of the US EPA report, which identified dioxins as the cause of many cancers? Even low-level exposure is now known to interfere with the immune, reproductive and endocrine systems.
Aside from the health effects, there is a far more fundamental ecological reason to oppose incineration. Incineration is simply not sustainable. The waste to energy argument is a nice sales pitch, but if saving energy is really the goal, then more energy can be saved by society as a whole by reusing and recycling materials rather than by burning them.
An example close to home will serve to illustrate this. Wellman International Ltd, a company based in Kells, recycles plastic bottles. Amazingly, it currently imports nearly all of the material, despite repeated pleas to Irish local authorities to supply it with PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles.
Apparently, Dublin Corporation still intends to incinerate any plastic collected as part of its Waste Management Strategy. Wellman calculates that by recycling instead of incinerating, there is a saving of one kilo of natural gas for every kilo of polyester produced from post-consumer bottles . Its recycling operations alone conserve 80,000 tonnes of natural gas each year.
Dr Paul Connett, professor of chemistry at St Laurence's University, New York, has argued that incineration attempts to conceal "the evidence of an unacceptable throwaway lifestyle".
There are those who accuse the Greens of being opposed to everything, including incineration, so it is important to outline the waste management options which the Green Party supports.
In the first place we see domestic waste as a low-tech problem. It is made by mixing. It is unmade by separation. This is because the material which causes most of the problems in landfills is organic (biodegradeable waste). This otherwise benign material, once it gets into a landfill, creates methane which contributes to global warming, odours and acid lechate which can pollute surface or ground water.
A brief outline of the waste management policy supported by the Green Party is as follows:
Separation of waste at source - glass, newspapers, tins, plastic, organic waste;
Home composting of kitchen and some garden waste;
Central composting of other organic waste;
A massive increase in recycling, which would involve a significant investment in recycling infrastructure and financial incentives to stimulate markets for recycled goods;
Local community based re-use and repair centres;
Smaller community-controlled landfill sites for dry, non-toxic and non-biodegradeable material;
Funding of research into better industrial design of products - recycling, re-use built into the initial design of products;
Community and industry-wide education and waste awareness programmes.
I genuinely hope that Frank McDonald hasn't closed his mind to the alternatives to incineration. His central argument would appear to be that countries with high environmental standards have incinerators, therefore to attain similar standards we ought to accept this technology.
These countries also have nuclear power stations, which have become less fashionable of late. Luckily, we avoided making that mistake. Now, let's ensure that we avoid the mistake of incineration.