Sir, - Frank McDonald's article on waste management (Weekend, December 16th) makes some good points, but the underlying message was worryingly misleading.
He rightly questions the wisdom of mass-burn incineration. He takes a swipe at the hugely expensive German approach to waste management, which would be well justified even if its reported attempts to stifle new ideas are untrue. It is all too easy to mock its manifest absurdities, while claiming to undercut it is about as significant as a hotelier claiming he can undercut the Ritz.
Moreover, the praise heaped on the Herhof system reeks of undigested PR puff! In fairness, perhaps the author was not well served by the sub-editors whose "flags" attracted me to the article: "Forget incineration. Forget landfill. Forget recycling." Hello? Herhof might wish to distance itself from crude forms of these disposal methods by renaming them - but its system involves all three! Then your pictures provoked me further by contrasting a landfill with a tidy pile of sample jars. Putting rubbish in jars is easy; the problem arises when you run out of jars or space to store them! More seriously, there are many ways of sorting waste into relatively pure fractions; the problem is that nobody wants most of the products. The limited market for waste paper in Ireland is a classic example.
You report that Herhof uses a "closed-loop recycling system", which by your own account closes no loops at all: carbon dioxide is emitted to the atmosphere, adding to global warming, while "slag" gets buried under new roads. It does separate glass, metals etc. "for recycling", but whether it gets recycled is another matter, central to the viability of the system. "Forget recycling"? Rubbish - if you'll forgive the expression!
Will they burn bricks? And what about the ash left after their RDF is burned? They can congeal it and relabel it "slag" but sugar is still sugar, whether it is lump or granulated. It may indeed have been approved for use in road building but how many miles of new roads will we need to build every day to get rid of it all? Forget landfill? Humbug! One of the few things agreed by every expert on waste management is that landfills will always be with us. Where and how we build them and what we put in them are the questions; their existence is not.
The most worrying aspect of this piece is the underlying message that there is a "quick-fix" solution for our wasteful society. Driving to the recycling centre to drop off a few Coke cans for recycling may salve the unexamined conscience. However, solving the waste problem will require that we think twice before buying the gassy water and using its gas-guzzling conveyance. We need to become more conscious of our waste, not less. Shoveling the lot off for Herhof to sort out will never achieve this. True, it is hard to squeeze recycling bins into a small kitchen. But it is hard to fit in anything new, so perhaps the fault lies in our obsession with fitted kitchens. Those handbag-sized, under-sink bins speak volumes about our "out of sight, out of mind" attitude to waste. And how many of us do manage to accommodate cookers, fridges, freezers, washing machines, tumble-dryers, dishwashers - and even TVs? No wonder there's no room for a few boxes! - Yours, etc.
Duncan J. Martin, Senior Lecturer in Chemical Engineering, University of Limerick, Limerick.