When Waste Disappears, or More Waste Please!

Alexander, Catherine

Abstract

Energy-from-waste plants in places like Britain were designed help reduce waste and carbon emissions, but they have had unintended side-effects. As Alexander’s essay shows, turning waste into energy does not liberate us from waste itself. On the contrary, the very energy plants that have made waste “disappear” by recasting it as a resource have, paradoxically, led to an increase of waste: in order to operate a new generation of large energy plants, demand for waste has risen and a tendency to ship waste to fewer and ever larger plants has set in.

Citation

Alexander, C. (2016). When Waste Disappears, or More Waste Please!. RCC perspectives (Internet), 1, 31-39. https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7391

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 3, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Apr 3, 2016
• Publication Date: Apr 3, 2016
• Deposit Date: Aug 3, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 5, 2018
• Journal: Rachel Carson Center perspectives
• Print ISSN: 2190-5088
• Electronic ISSN: 2190-8087
• Publisher: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Pages: 31-39
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7391
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1324550
• Related Public URLs: http://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/2016_1_alexander.pdf