Speaking at a conference on environmental best practice, with delegates from Berlin, Paris, Moscow and London, Mr Strieder, Berlin's Minister for Urban Development, explained how Berlin is leading the way in Europe with recycling rates moving past 37% and a recovery policy looking to close landfill sites by 2005.
Mr Strieder said: “People from the environmental movement don't want incineration – that's why we are trying to reduce our waste. We had a big mediation in the middle of the 1990s with all these groups and we wrote a strategy for Berlin to increase recycling and to use the waste for other purposes – and now we are trying to create methanol.”
Methanol can be produced from waste by a process of fermentation, chemically converting the waste into the organic alcohol fuel by the use of enzymes within a reactor kept at a certain temperature. One of the many uses of such a fuel would be to replace petrol in motor vehicles.
“Volkswagen is doing it now, for their waste,” Mr Strieder said. “They created a big methanol plant, and they're going to create a motor vehicle which can use methanol as fuel.”
Incineration
Moving towards such a method of waste management will take quite some time to make serious inroads into the amount of waste going for incineration, however, and Mr Strieder admitted that incineration is still a huge part of Berlin's waste strategy.
“We have incineration – 520,000 tonnes,” he said. “Half of the city's waste is going to the incinerator, the other half is going to landfill. But from 2005 on, it is not allowed to go to landfill – all landfills will be closed and all waste is to go to incineration or other energy production.”
London mayor Ken Livingstone made it clear that both he would be taking these lessons on board. He said: “It's absolutely clear that London is just about the worst of all the great cities in Europe, so far behind, and therefore we need to copy their best practice.”
Despite advances in clean emission technology, the incineration of waste to produce energy in the form of electricity remains unpopular among the public, and politicians in some parts of the UK are actively looking for less controversial alternatives.
Some Greater London Assembly members present at the conference were involved in the decision to turn down the application from LondonWaste to extend the existing 55 MW energy-from-waste incinerator at Edmonton, north London (see letsrecycle.com article) .
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