Greens call for moratorium on waste incinerators, 15 Sept 2011

GREEN MSP MEDIA RELEASE, For immediate release 15 September 2011

INCINERATION IS A DANGEROUS DISTRACTION FROM ZERO WASTE

Green MSPs today called for the Scotland Government to urgently revise its 'Zero Waste' strategy to bring in a moratorium on new incinerators during a debate at Holyrood. (1) The Scottish Greens are the only party that has consistently opposed industrial scale incineration and the party strongly supports communities across Scotland fighting plans for a generation of new incinerators. 

Greens argue that incinerators will dramatically undermine recycling efforts by creating a built-in demand for waste. Instead, the Scottish Government should scale up support for innovative local reuse and recycling initiatives that create far more jobs. (2) Greens want to see the powers in the 2009 Climate Change Act used to bring in packaging 'deposit and return' schemes, which have resulted in very high recycling and reuse rates in Scandinavian countries. (3)

Patrick Harvie MSP said:

"The Scottish Government's efforts to push through a new generation of incinerators are a dangerous distraction from creating a true zero-waste Scotland, based instead on community-scale reuse and recycling. Incineration is part of the same old mindset of dump and run, it's 'landfill in the sky' for local authorities who are running out of space but aren't acting to tackle the root causes of this problem. Greens stand with campaigners in Newton Mearns, in Invergordon and in many other communities across Scotland who are simply concerned about the health of their families and the impact on their local environments. 

"Listening to the debates on waste, it often sounds as if Ministers have run out of good ideas for tackling waste, but there are hundreds of creative projects in every part of Scotland that are finding ways to reduce waste. The Government needs to ramp up support for these projects rather than undermining them with a growing dependence on incineration. Let's not give up the first principle of reducing our use of valuable resources in the first place - something the SNP have yet even to start looking at."

Notes

1. For the SNP Government's "Zero Waste" strategy, which removed the cap on the proportion of waste that can be incinerated, see:
http://scot.gr/fa

2. Figures from the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States indicate that recycling creates six times more jobs than landfill, per tonne, and thirty-six times more jobs than incineration:
http://is.gd/cIQ0Y

3. The powers to implement a national scheme in Scotland were brought in the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, sections 84-7

James Mackenzie
Media and Communications
Scottish Green MSPs
Scottish Parliament
Edinburgh EH99 1SP

Tel: 0131 348 6360
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