A State-of-the-Art Alternative to Incineration for Residual Municipal Waste- MBT

Publication date: February 2003

Summary
The aim of this study is to assess the possibilities for a system for managing residual waste which does not include any thermal treatment process. The study includes a review of mechanical biological treatment (MBT) systems and their potential effects.

MBT systems are not new. In their more primitive guises, they can be considered a basic evolution from the (usually failed) mixed waste composting plants of two decades ago. However, the potential for integrating systems based around biological treatment of degradable fractions with increasingly efficient mechanical separation techniques is a more recent development, as is the tendency to look to employ digestion techniques for the biological treatment phase as opposed to aerobic treatments.

As a pollutant, waste demands controls. As an embodiment of accumulated energy and materials it invites an alternative.
(The whole file is 1mb; the report is broken down below for easier download)

Publication date: February 2002

Summary
Waste policy has become one of the most keenly contested areas of environmental politics. At a local level in the UK and abroad, new sites for landfills and incinerators have provoked degrees of civil opposition matched only by proposals for new roads and nuclear power plants. Nationally and internationally, there has been hand-to-hand fighting in the institutions of governance over clauses, targets and definitions of the strategies and regulative regimes that are shaping a new era for waste management.

For those professionally involved in the waste industry in Britain, it is as though a searchlight has suddenly been shone on an activity that for a hundred years was conducted in obscurity. Throughout the twentieth century, waste was the terminus of industrial production. Like night cleaners, the waste industry had the task of removing the debris from the main stage of daily activity. Some of the debris had value and was recycled. Most was deposited in former mines, gravel pits and quarries or, via incinerators, was 'landfilled in the air'. The principle was to keep it out of sight. Whereas consumer industries seek publicity, this post-consumer industry prided itself on its invisibility.

Zero waste report:
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Organic and agroecological farming in the South
(1.3mb file size)

Publication date: February 2002

Summary
The crisis in Argentina in late 2001 illustrated again a frustrating and unjust reality: there is no direct relationship between the amount of food a country produces and the number of hungry people who live there. In 2001, Argentina harvested enough wheat to meet the needs of both China and India. Yet Argentina's people were hungry. Argentina's status as the world's second largest producer of GM crops - largely for export - could do nothing to solve its very real hunger problems at home. For fifty years conventional agriculture has been getting less and less sustainable. Chemical pesticides, fertilizers and hybrid seeds have destroyed wildlife and crop diversity, poisoned people and ruined the soil. Now that the organic movement is taking off in the industrialised world , governments, international agencies and global agribusiness corporations must stop promoting this destructive system in the South. Instead, there must be coherent and long-term support - in practice as well as in principle - to enable the nascent ecological farming movement in poorer countries to continue to grow into the future.