A few years ago, I spent an interesting if pungent day visiting two of Europe’s most advanced waste processing facilities, a state-of-the-art rubbish dump near Espoo in Finland and a power station in nearby Vantaa. Together, they are playing a pivotal role in greater Helsinki’s push towards a circular economy, ensuring that every scrap of the city’s municipal waste is either recycled or turned into energy or heat, so nothing is sent to landfill. I remember thinking, “How brilliant, I wish we could do that”.
It turns out we in the UK can, and are. But it took me a bit of legwork, and some frustration, to find that out.
Mixed municipal waste, as rubbish discarded by the general public is technically known, is a big mess. Global production is around and is projected to rise to 3.4 billion tonnes by 2050. That’s about , and hence a major contributor to the pollution crisis that is engulfing the world.
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After Finland, I was a bit obsessed with cleaning up my own contribution to this problem. I was already a diligent recycler, but still discarded a lot of non-recyclable waste, mostly plastic. But with a bit of effort, I found a place to take it. Most weeks, my general refuse bag, which I assumed went to landfill, was empty.
Then I moved to York and was shocked by what I assumed was a substandard waste system. Glass, cans, cardboard, paper and plastic bottles go into shared recycling containers, yet everything else, even food waste, goes in the bin. I tried taking my non-recyclable plastic to the recycling centre, but was pointed to a bin labelled “waste-to-energy” into which a couple were hefting an old carpet. Unsure what that meant, I took it home and left it in the garage.
I was especially perturbed by the absence of food waste recycling: years of living in a part of London with strict rules on the disposal of biodegradables have made me averse to dropping tea bags or vegetable peelings into the general rubbish. So I religiously collected all my organic waste and took it to a local community garden with a compost bin.
I won’t be doing that anymore. Not because it is too much of a chore, but because I don’t need to. When I dug into how my new city deals with its waste, I found I am basically living my Finnish dream.
I was pointed to a bin labelled 'waste-to-energy', into which a couple were hefting an old carpet
Everything that goes in my bin ends up at a place called , which meticulously sorts it into separate waste streams using a variety of smart technologies and some manual labour. Everything recyclable is recycled. Everything biodegradable is sent to an anaerobic digester and converted into biogas. Everything else is burned to generate electricity, enough to power 66,000 homes. The flue gases from this waste-to-energy incinerator are scrubbed clean of particulates and toxic gases. The final residue, ash, is used in construction materials. Almost everything gets recycled or reused. North Yorkshire Council says that since Allerton opened in 2018, the amount of rubbish going to landfill has fallen by 90 per cent.
You may have spotted the catch: burning trash generates carbon dioxide that is vented into the atmosphere. A 2023 by the council found that Allerton had emitted almost 300,000 tonnes of CO2 in the past year. There’s also the fact that the incinerated waste – such as the carpet tossed in the skip – took natural resources and energy to produce in the first place. Burning it for energy is essentially the same as extracting fossil fuels and burning them.
Still, in a straight fight between waste-to-energy and landfill, the former is by far the lesser of two evils. The same report says that putting the trash into landfill would have emitted 25 times as much greenhouse gas.
Allerton is part of a largely unsung movement gradually consigning landfill to the rubbish dump of history. It is one of in the UK that about half of the 24.5 million tonnes of household and other municipal waste we generate each year. Most of the rest is recycled; only 7 per cent goes to landfill. That’s a huge turnaround from the early 2000s when went to landfill.
This is a global trend – according to research and advocacy group Transnational Institute, the size of the waste-to-energy industry is forecast to double over the next decade. At the same time, the technology for converting waste into energy without emitting carbon is improving; Allerton has plans to go carbon neutral.
The fact this is all happening under the radar is a good thing. Putting the onus on ordinary people to solve the waste crisis doesn’t work; even in eco-minded Helsinki, household recycling rates are low. We just need this stuff to happen for us; for once, it seems it is. Sorry, community garden, my food waste is going in the bin from now on.
Graham’s week
What I’m reading
A novel called Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan. It caught my eye in a charity shop. £2.50 well spent.
What I’m watching
Wolf Hall: The mirror and the light on the BBC.
What I’m working on
Ending my aversion to putting food waste in the dustbin.
Graham Lawton is a staff writer at 91av and author of Mustn’t Grumble: The surprising science of everyday ailments. You can follow him @grahamlawton
