However, even if these concerns are overcome, as we move into the twenty first century, the role of municipal waste incineration, with or without energy recovery, will become less and less viable, both economically and environmentally. Our future task will be dominated by a need to find sustainable ways of preventing waste creation at source. Those who have been preoccupied with making incineration safe have lavished their engineering ingenuity on the wrong question. The argument that burning waste can be used to recover energy makes for good sales promotion, but the reality is that if saving energy is the goal, then more energy can be saved by society as a whole by reusing and recycling objects and materials than can be recovered by burning them. This is being deliberately overlooked in the calculations contained in the Mid-West Waste Management plan.
Municipal waste is a low-tech problem.
Mixing it in the first place makes it. Both problem and solution are at our fingertips, not on the drawing boards of Danish or Swedish engineers. Both incineration and raw waste landfilling attempt to bury the evidence of an unacceptable throwaway lifestyle. Every incinerator built delays this fundamental discussion by at least 20 years. The Draft Waste Management Plan for the Limerick, Clare and Kerry regions is currently on display for public consultation at public libraries and council offices.