Waste to Energy is Green-washing
Sweden is burning your trash and unsold clothes And it's being touted as an environmentally applaudable behaviour. This is green-washing at its peak. Incineration/waste to energy (W2E) is second last on the waste management hierarchy. Simply it means they burn the garbage to produce heat which makes steam which runs a turbine. It's not very energetically efficient, and it requires a lot of big machinery and filter systems to ensure the pollution doesn't escape and spread its toxic vapours everywhere. And then they must safely dispose of the concentrated chemical ash. But what I find most troubling about W2E is that they lock cities and countries into contracts, assuring they provide a certain amount of feedstock / garbage each year. This sways the motivation away from reducing waste in the first place, and instead towards the perpetuation of our over-consumptive materialist culture. There's no incentive to implement zero waste practices or change behaviou