· 10 min read
Every time we burn waste, we prove that the system was built wrong.
For decades, incineration was sold as the smart way to deal with the waste we could not recycle. It kept rubbish out of landfills, cut methane leaks, generated electricity and heat, and seemed to offer a modern, technical fix for the mess left by a throwaway society. It looked like progress, and for a while it was. But what began as a bridge away from landfill has become a roadblock, locking cities into decades of debt, destroying valuable materials, creating deeply unhelpful incentives and distracting us from the real task: designing waste out of the system altogether.
Europe is entering a decisive chapter in its waste story, where the choice is no longer between landfill and incineration but between destruction and design. We can keep feeding the flames, or we can treat waste as a design flaw, not an inevitability.
The promise that became a problem
When waste-to-energy took off in the 1980s and 1990s, landfill was dominant and toxic. Methane emissions, leachate (rain water that filters through landfill waste picking up all sorts of nasty chemical, metals and microplastics on the way) contaminating water tables, and growing public opposition made it politically and environmentally unsustainable. Incineration promised something better: no mountains of waste, less methane, and the bonus of heat and power. It helped countries meet EU landfill diversion targets. That was marketed as innovation, a neat solution that promised to turn a liability into an asset.
But the model came with a flaw built into its DNA. Incinerators run around the clock and demand a constant diet of waste. They were designed and financed for 25 to 40 years of continuous feeding, locking cities into long-term obligations. The result is a perverse incentive: even as recycling improves and waste volumes decline, municipalities are left chasing rubbish to keep the furnaces alive and the debts repaid.
The consequences are plain in Copenhagen. The Amager Resource Center, better known for the ski slope on its roof, was built on a thirty-year loan and now depends on importing between fifty and seventy thousand tonnes of foreign waste each year simply to keep its furnaces alight. To picture that, it is the equivalent of more than 2,400 London double-decker buses filled to the brim with rubbish. Denmark has acknowledged sector overcapacity of up to seven hundred thousand tonnes and adopted a plan to cut capacity by about thirty percent and to close seven plants, a costly recognition that the model was built for a throwaway society we are now trying to leave behind.
Gipuzkoa tells a similar story, though without the ski slope. The Zubieta incinerator was built to burn two hundred thousand tonnes a year and financed with eighty million euros of bonds that will not be paid off until 2047. That kind of debt brings an unavoidable pressure to keep the furnaces full, whether or not local waste supplies are enough. Campaigners say the plant has gone so far as to import residues that are not even household waste in order to meet its targets. Independent testing by ToxicoWatch has found alarmingly high levels of dioxins, PFAS, and heavy metals in soil, moss, and even backyard eggs around the site. One egg carried the highest dioxin level measured anywhere in Europe in more than a decade. Small wonder then that local anger has grown and the European Parliament has asked Brussels to review whether the plant is operating within EU law.
The real environmental cost
Waste-to-energy is not clean energy, however modern the plant may look. Each tonne of municipal waste burned releases between 0.7 and 1.7 tonnes of CO₂, much of it from plastics that are made from fossil fuels. Once in the furnace, they behave no differently from oil or gas. Industry spokespeople like to argue that “new plants” are different, with advanced filters and scrubbers that keep emissions in check. It is true that today’s smokestacks are cleaner than those of the 1970s. But the pollutants do not vanish. They move.
Nitrogen oxides still contribute to smog and respiratory illness. Ultrafine particles enter the bloodstream. Dioxins and heavy metals accumulate in soils and food chains, where they are later found in moss, eggs, and milk. The European Environment Agency itself has admitted that while standards have improved, emissions are “reduced, not eliminated.” And as the World Health Organisation has pointed out, there is no safe threshold for dioxin exposure.
The most toxic by-product, fly ash, has to be sealed in hazardous landfills for generations. Bottom ash, the bulk residue, is often reused in construction, but studies repeatedly find traces of lead, cadmium, and other contaminants leaching into soils and groundwater. Even the filters and scrubbing systems come at a cost: they consume chemicals and energy of their own, adding to the carbon footprint.
So yes, modern plants have improved on the worst of the past. But they have not solved the underlying problem. They are still machines for destroying materials and releasing carbon. The designs may be sleeker, the PR more polished, but the physics has not changed. The European Environment Agency couldn’t be clearer, even the cleanest‑looking incinerators still emit harmful pollutants.
The backlash is real. In France, senators have proposed banning new incinerators outright. In Rome, tens of thousands have rallied to stop a new build. This is a growing rejection of the system is a good thing. These facilities are a distraction from the work of building a truly circular economy. As Janek Vahk of Zero Waste Europe puts it: “Burning rubbish is not a solution. It is a failure to tackle the problem at its source.”
And the impact falls unequally. In the UK, investigators found that incinerators are three times more likely to be located in the most deprived and ethnically diverse neighbourhoods than in affluent areas. That is environmental injustice, plain and simple.
When the money walks away
Follow the money and you see the direction of travel. For years, waste-to-energy was seen as a safe investment, backed by long contracts and guaranteed streams of rubbish. But Europe no longer treats it as part of the future. It has been written out of the EU’s green taxonomy, which is the list of activities judged to be sustainable. That might sound technical, but it matters. It tells investors and banks that burning waste is not compatible with a net zero Europe.
The European Investment Bank has followed suit, stepping away from funding incineration and putting its capital behind recycling, reuse, and waste prevention instead. Others are following. Few fund managers want to explain why they are locking money into a technology that destroys resources Europe says must be kept in play.
As one Brussels policymaker put it to me, “A system that depends on destroying materials can never be called sustainable.” Europe has got the message. Investors have heard it too.
Between 2019 and 2023, the European Investment Bank poured almost €4 billion into circular economy projects. Ikea’s investment arm has committed over a billion dollars to recycling ventures across Europe. Veolia is building one of the largest closed loop plastic recycling facilities in Britain, backed by seventy million pounds of fresh capital.
These are not isolated examples. The centre of gravity in waste is no longer fire and smoke, but systems that preserve value and keep materials in play.
Circularity and incineration cannot coexist
Europe’s evolving framework puts prevention, reuse, and recycling at the top of the hierarchy. Incineration pulls in the opposite direction. Plastics, textiles, organics, and metals are all destroyed, and once they are gone, they are gone for good. Every year, Europe’s incinerators burn an amount of material that weighs more than 5,500 Eiffel Towers. That is resource destruction on an industrial scale.
As Walter Stahel, one of the early thinkers behind the circular economy, once said: “Products should be designed for reuse, not for rapid destruction.” Yet our incineration capacity has locked us into a model that treats destruction as infrastructure. The difficult position we are in is obvious. Europe says it wants to build a circular economy, but its waste system is still built to turn irreplaceable resources into smoke and ash.
A better way forward
Dubai shows what can happen when priorities are set in the right order. The city invested first in the basics: sorting centres, public engagement, and digital tracking of material flows. That gave investors the confidence to step in, building recycling plants and even creating a marketplace for recovered materials. The system was designed from the ground up to keep value in play, not to burn it away.
Milan chose a different route. Instead of building another incinerator in 2010, the city doubled down on door-to-door collection of food waste. Today, close to 90 percent of Milan’s organics are turned into compost and biogas. What was once seen as a headache is now part of the city’s pride, and Milan is recognised as one of Europe’s leaders in zero waste.
In Bergen, Norway, waste disappears underground. Pneumatic tubes now carry rubbish directly from buildings to central sorting stations, cutting truck traffic by almost 90 percent.
Parma, in Italy, has shown what happens when communities are trusted to lead. By combining strict rules on dumping with investment in reuse centres and school programmes, the city has turned recycling into a shared civic duty. It now enjoys one of the highest recycling rates in Europe and a population that sees waste not as an inevitability but as something that can be prevented.
As the saying goes, there are many roads to Rome. These cities simply started from the principle that burning is not the answer. Once you commit to keeping resources in circulation, the innovations follow.
Shared Responsibility
Governments should be asking hard questions before committing public money to contracts that extend the life of technology the world is moving away from. Investment ought to be directed toward systems that preserve resources rather than destroy them. Manufacturers also have a crucial role. They can design products that last longer, that can be repaired when they break, and that can be taken apart so the materials can be used again. Consumers have choices too. We can repair instead of replace when possible, and we can make proper use of the recycling systems that exist.
This is not only about what individuals do in their homes. At its core, what we call a waste problem is really a design challenge. If we build products and systems with disposal in mind, waste is inevitable. If we design for durability, recovery, and reuse, waste starts to shrink. It becomes less an unavoidable fact of life and more a reflection of choices that could be made differently.
We are not condemned to a throwaway world. We can choose to build one that values materials for as long as possible. If we treat waste as inevitable, we will keep building machines to burn it. If we treat it as a design flaw, we open the door to an economy that never needed it in the first place.
Closing Thought
Europe’s incinerators were built for a world that wasted without thinking. That world is fading, and what comes next will depend on the choices we make now. We can keep chasing rubbish to feed furnaces, or we can start designing systems that no longer need them.
This is not just about technology or policy. It is about imagination. If we can picture a society where materials are kept in play, where waste is seen as a mistake not an inevitability, then we can build it.
As Buckminster Fuller once said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That is the challenge before us, and the opportunity.
illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.
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