Reducing landfill is a good thing to do - not some sort of EU green conspiracy

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There's a common line from those who dislike either or both of climate change policies and the EU that the encouragement of recycling and strategies to reduce the use of landfill are just another of those idiotic greeny-greeny nonsenses. We've read this from Christopher Booker, on the EU Referendum blog and now from James Delingpole in the Daily Mail:

Every year Britain produces about 70 million cubic metres of municipal waste, while it has more than 819 million cubic metres available for landfill — a figure that increases by 114 million cubic metres a year as more quarries and gravel pits are dug.

By far the most attractive and safe option would be to have these gaping holes filled with rubbish and covered over or reclaimed, so the landscape looks almost as it did before.

This would have knock-on benefits for the aggregates industry, which could offset its costs — as it did in the old days — with waste disposal.

It would release local councils from layer upon layer of regulatory bureaucracy. No longer would we have to waste time pointlessly sifting our rubbish. And it would, of course, bring an almost immediate end to fly-tipping.

This, after all, was the system that worked perfectly well for us before our politicians and the EU stuck their oars in. If only we had the will and the courage of our convictions, it could work just as well for us now.

My instant reaction (one that most Cullingworth residents would share) is 'there speaks a man who doesn't have two landfill sites in his village' but to explain the problem let's describe landfill and consider what we mean by 'municipal waste'.

Modern landfill can be described as finding a big enough hole in the ground, putting a very big plastic bag (a sophisticated, highly-engineered plastic bag to be sure but still a plastic bag) into the hole rather like you do with the bin in your kitchen, filling it up with rubbish until you can't get any more in and then covering it over. And then we wait thirty to fifty years with out fingers crossed hoping that big plastic bag doesn't split.

Then there's the stuff we put in the landfill. 'Domestic' waste they call it and it's all that stuff you put in your general waste bin. So there's fairly benign stuff like food scraps, paper and plastic. And a cocktail of nasty unpleasant chemicals - the bits of bleach you don't rinse out from the bottle, the heavy metals in the spent AA batteries, the residual contents of aerosols, shampoos and a bewildering variety of pharmaceuticals. Domestic waste is truly filthy stuff - poisonous, corrosive and polluting. As it rots is produces a very dangerous leachate - the big plastic bag is all that stops this leachate from polluting water supplies and contaminating land. Do you really think the best way to deal with this waste is to but it in a big plastic bag on the hill above Cullingworth?

Now Delingpole is right to criticise the EU's waste licensing regimes, to question how the ramping up of landfill charges contributes to illegal dumping and to condemn the nonsensical manner in which recyclers are prevented from exporting recovered goods or materials. But this doesn't change the fact that landfill isn't the best way to deal with hazardous waste. Nearly all of that 70 million cubic metres of trash local councils collect is pretty dangerous stuff. Simply dumping it into holes in the ground without pre-treatment or the reduction of pollution risk is a recipe for blighting communities. And the best way to reduce those risks is to promote recycling.

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Fracking and the legacy of the mines...

Harry Stone was a miner born
He worked to win his wages
Riding down the cages
And raging at the seams
He worked his stall from dusk till dawn
Sweet sweat and raw endeavour
Black diamonds bound together
By a strong and simple means

For two-hundred years and more England built its wealth and success, in large part, on the exploitation of its minerals  - as someone said we're an island of coal in a sea of oil. And, for all the machismo of coal-mining, it was a dangerous life and the winning of coal left great scars on the landscape, polluted the environment and created unstable landforms. The blasting of the coalface and the shifting to the tunnel-ridden rocks led to subsidence and even earth tremors.

Yet the coal ripped from the ground was the fuel for our industrial revolution. That coal provided the heat and light, the power to drag us from bare subsistence agriculture to today's warn, healthy and pleasant condition. Those men who rode the cages down into the dark - the ones who died in accidents, the one's who coughed up their lungs - they played a great part us us being wealthy.

Today the land around the mines - 'scarred like the face of the moon' as the Cornish tin and clay mined landscape was once described - slowly recovers. Where once there were ugly, deep-grey heaps of waste and spoil, we now see young woodland, ponds, trails and fields. In places the structures of the minehead are preserved - a reminder of why the town is there and what men did in times past.

Today a new fuel is there for us to win, a fuel that can power our lights, our homes, our industry for a hundred years and more. It's a fuel that doesn't require men to crawl into dark holes, to destroy their health with dust and fumes. It's a fuel we can win from the surface without despoiling the landscape, without any significant - let alone long-lasting - damage to the environment. It's a fuel that can replace the last few coal-powered generators and ensure that we can all keep our homes warm at a reasonable price.

And the fuel is shale gas. Compared to the damage - to society health and environment - that coal-mining causes, the winning of shale gas is benign. Yet people living in places that have gained from the wealth of mining without the costs of winning that wealth would stop us all - including the children of those miners - from enjoying this benefit:

The prospect of fracking is what has unsettled Fernhurst. Towers burning off excess gas and oil wouldn’t fit in with Tennyson’s vision of ‘Green Sussex fading into blue’. Beyond that, there is a terror of toxic and radioactive leaks and long-term pollution of aquifers. Marcus Adams, leader of the Frack Free Fernhurst campaign group, told me, ‘I find it extraordinary that the government allows companies to use this fracking technology when we don’t properly understand it.’ Adams is no environmentalist, merely an ordinary if concerned bloke who has lived in the area for many years. He is convinced that permission to explore will lead to permission to frack, so he and some likeminded neighbours want to thwart Celtique’s initial proposal.

Compared to the cost of mining - a cost that people like Marcus Adams didn't pay although they live with the benefits of that mining - the impact of fracking is vanishingly small. And, short term. Part of me shrugs at the opposition - I'm sure the opposition would be there wherever the extraction took place - but another part is angry.

Angry that the twisting and misrepresenting of the facts by environmental campaigners, the frenetic lobbying of the 'renewable' energy companies and the scaremongering of media results in a risk that the benefit of a 100 years of cheaper energy will be denied us. That we should slide into a world of brown-outs, industrial decline and ever higher energy prices just to protect - for a few years - a few acres of Sussex.

If this attitude had prevailed in times past we wouldn't have dug those mines at Wentworth, at Heanor and in Ashington. Instead we'd have left it there and carried on burning wood and scraping a living - in a good year - from a third of an acre of poor field.  But we did dig those mineshafts and win that coal, it did help make us rich.

And the least thanks we can offer the miners who won that coal is to go and win the shale gas, to provide the fuel to power future generations and future industry.

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