It appears as though protests lodged by environmentalists against plans to build an incinerator in the southern England county of Sussex have been rejected by the High Court.
Good!
Sometimes I honestly have cause to wonder just what these enviro-types put in their tea. Have they thought out their objection to waste incinerators thoroughly?
Incinerators used to be clunky, marginally unsafe operations — true — but technology has moved on.
Incinerators can not only now act as energy suppliers, by tapping the energy given off by the burning of society's debris and detritus, but also, they safely handle all the toxic and biological wastes that laboratories and hospitals create. Are environmentalists honestly saying that we should continue to landfill that stuff? We're talking about some extremely nasty waste here, and burning it seems like a perfectly logical answer.
Think about all the soiled diapers that go into the garbage stream. Gonna procreate? Then incinerate. And for all the recycling that some households and companies apparently do, there still seems to be plenty of trash around. Well, it's all plastic. Good ol' plastic. Plastic that can't be recycled or simply isn't profitable to recycle. All the styrofoam and polypropelene (so-called #5 plastics) that abound in cafeterias, makes up drinks containers and in which nearly every single item in the supermarket comes packaged; not to mention all those plastic shopping bags that everyone adores and finds so convenient. All this gets thrown out by the hundreds of thousands of tons in every major city, every day.
Just think of the typical bag of rubbish that a business like Souper Salad, for instance (all those disposable plastic salad trays and forks!), creates, and multiply it by 100 billion. This is the sort of crisis we're facing because we're apparently too stupid as a species to remember how we ever survived without all this "convenience;" before it got invented in the mid 20th century, became ubiquitous in the late 20th century, and started filling every nook and cranny in our lives, as it currently does.
Article comments
1 - zingzing
"Gonna procreate? Then incinerate."
um, that has got to be the best slogan for... something...
congratulations.
ok, back to reading.
2 - Condor
I have a Yellowstone Caldera theory, but if you google the Yellowstone Caldera, you will get the picture. In short.... 2 major eruptions (as far as can be determined) in Geological history buried the North American Continent and of course devestated that landscape, changed the global climate, wiped out all types of flora and fauna.
It's only a matter of time.... millions of years, but time nonetheless. Then all this crap is moot.
But... I do understand the need for babbling brooks, clean air and less noise pollution. I would like to see the stars too, like you can out at sea, deep within the wilderness, or desert.
Not that those physical attributes are human rights or anything... but it would promote a pleasing environment. Which I believe is the goal; a pleasing place to live.
Will we get there? It would be nice wouldn't it.
3 - Bill Walker
Ever ton of carbon converted from waste to electricity prevents the energy equivalent of a more expensive energy resource such as coal, oil or gas from being exploited. Buried carbon, regardless of how secure the land fill, will eventually oxidize and evolve back into the environment unless we can duplicate billions of years geotechnic compression. Some say converting waste to energy relieves the guilt off of not recycling. The major guilt trip should be placed on using ancient carbon.
4 - Dr Dreadful
It would have been one thing if they'd been wanting to plonk the incinerator down in the middle of the South Downs. I'd have had a thing or two to say about that as well.
But it's going to be in the middle of the Newhaven docks, for crying out loud. Hardly the epitome of yon green and pleasant land. I'm all for building such facilities on reused urban land, rather than contributing to sprawl.
I do have one quibble with you though, Mark. Britain is the eighth largest island in the world. At 88,975 square miles, it's about the same size as Minnesota and it'll take you about 14 hours to drive from one end to the other (a bit under 900 miles). So it's hardly 'tiny'.
5 - zingzing
i could poop 900 miles.
6 - Dr Dreadful
All together now...
Oh I could poop 900 miles
And I could poop 900 more...
Come on now, zing... sing!
7 - zingzing
of for fuck's sake, dread... get out of my head, get out of my head!
8 - Clavos
Ha.
Ha.
9 - Jet
Oh great, now that song's going to be stuck in my head all day... thanks a lot
10 - Jet
Dah dalata
...dah dalata
Dah dalata
...dah dalata
Dat dadalundadlundodlun da da da
Doc, I swear I'll get you for this...
11 - Dr Dreadful
It must be hard to fully appreciate that song if you can't do the Glasgow accent.
How about their other famous one:
When ye goooooo will ye send back
A skidmarrrk frrrom Amerrricaaa?
Tak a poooop doon the rrrail trrracks
From Miami toooo Canada...
12 - Jet
(:^p~~~~~~~~~~~~~