Daily Telegraph: "Tipping point: what happens when our landfills are full?"

Link to Daily Telegraph report

Picture: "The landfill site at Remo, north-east Belgium,

which a firm wants to mine, in order to reuse the waste"

"In 2007, the Local Government Association reported that in Britain a combined area the size of Warwick was taken up with landfill. In July last year, it warned that the country will run out of space for its rubbish by 2018 unless new sites are found.

"The real nail in the coffin is the European Union’s landfill directive (first issued in 1999 but ramped up over the years with increasingly ambitious targets), which will impose fines of up to £1 million a day if we send more than 50 per cent of our waste to landfill by 2013, or 35 per cent by 2020 (currently we send 48 per cent to landfill).

"Unsurprisingly, environmental groups aren’t fans of incineration. According to Friends of the Earth, incinerators are considerably worse on carbon efficiency than even coal-fired power stations. It seems perverse that developed economies – so keen in other ways to kill CO2-belching industries – are looking to incineration as an alternative to landfill."