The Strange Retraction of Peter Jones
January 29, 2009 by Ken
Filed under Environ-mental, Uncategorized
I do not often watch BBC News and it was only by accident that I did so on Monday night when they showed an item about recycling. This item was based on comments made by Peter Jones and I suppose hit the headlines because Jones is a key adviser to environment ministers and the London Mayor, He is also ex director of the waste management company Biffa which is incidentally my own waste contractor.
The BBC report made clear that Jones was questioning the impact of recycling on climate change and said that recycling needed to be assessed to see whether it was “adding to or reducing” carbon emissions. This was set against the background film of refuse being burned to produce electricity. The implication being clear in the BBC film that a leading government adviser was questioning the benefits of recycling and suggesting incineration as an alternative.
This was picked up by the newsprint media, who took the main line that a leading government adviser was questioning the benefits of recycling.
The Telegraph quotes Mr Jones as saying:
“It might be that the global warming impact of putting material through an incinerator five miles down the road is actually less than recycling it 3,000 miles away,” “We’ve got to urgently get a grip on how this material is flowing through the system; whether we’re actually adding to or reducing the overall impact in terms of global warming potential in this process.”
The Mail also added:
“In overall terms we are reducing our carbon footprint by diverting material from landfill, but there is no hard and fast system to quantify it accurately and therefore we are in danger of losing those reductions through the wrong policy decisions by over-reliance on single exit solutions like composting or recycling.”
Then the attacks on Jones began to surface as reported in the Times
Dr David Coley, climate change and global warming expert at Exeter University, said there was no evidence to support the comments. “They are completely vacuous, because he hasn’t got any evidence. He’s suggesting a major switch to incineration with energy generation. We’re not currently doing that on a large scale so he’s talking about radical change…without any evidence that it would be better.”
Becky Slater, campaigner for waste resources at Friends of the Earth, said: “He seems to be implying there’s a debate to be had about whether to recycle and as far as we’re concerned it’s not debatable, the evidence is clear.
Dr Liz Goodwin, the chief executive of WRAP, the Government’s Waste and Resources Action Programme, said Mr Jone’s comments threaten to derail recycling initiatives.
Now Mr Jones after creating the frenzy in the first place suddenly begins to backtrack with this piece on letsrecycle .com, claiming that he had been misrepresented in the Telegraph and the Mail and he rejected the suggestion that he had questioned the value of recycling and called into question the Telegraph article in particular which he said was “rotten in parts”.
He said: “I did not ever suggest that recycling is a waste of time – that is a nonsensical position to take and those who know me would find such an assertion laughable.”
In a letter sent to the author of the Telegraph article, Louise Gray, clarifying his position, Mr Jones added: “[Recycling] is a valuable and important contribution to the fight on global warming.”
Mr Jones explained that what he had sought to convey was that more needed to be done to assess the carbon impact of transporting and treating materials in order to identify best practice.
But there is a different perspective on this argument that Jones has instigated, if one were to understand (and those who know him probably do) that Mr Peter Jones is the director of a company called Waste 2 tricity, which is a new British venture established to make waste-to-energy viable, efficient and economical, it becomes clearer where he is coming from.
He creates a big media story by announcing that recycling could be adding to C02 which is his argument despite the retractions. This in turn promotes his own company which offer a viable alternative not just recycling but all the other methods of waste disposal.
The problem for Jones and his co directors who include Tim Yeo, M.P is that recycling is the major vehicle for waste disposal and is thus his major competitor, he has just put a spoke in the wheel of the already collapsing recycling wagon to his own benefit.
Whether it will be a benefit to the country is another question but as recycling is already showing its inherent weakness by being driven not by demand but by the amount of rubbish we produce, we do need to rethink our waste disposal solutions, and seriously look at alternatives.
recycling processes themselves use energy without guaranteed revenue from the recovered materials
Waste 2 tricity has a steep hill to climb as the EU seems to be totally sold on the Friends of the Earth recycling answer to the problem which down grades any alternative because it might potentially divert funds from recycling.
This argument can be seen in the response to Jones comments
“He seems to be implying there’s a debate to be had” not even allowed to imply!
“They are completely vacuous, because he hasn’t got any evidence”
“threaten to derail recycling initiatives.”
The evidence that recycling is not working is piling up around us or being swept under the carpet in China.
The problem is global warming emissions from landfill sites yet this has been transposed into recycling, thus we must reach recycling targets and to do so we must not divert funds into alternatives that might offer a better solution to the problem.
the decisions made at a European level have by far the greatest influence on what local authorities do with waste. For example, scores of incinerators were closed down at the end of 1996 due to the European Incineration Directive (law) introducing controls on pollution from incineration. The targets in the 1999 Landfill Directive for diverting biodegradable municipal waste away from landfill are now biting on local authorities through the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme.
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefing_notes/eu_directives.pdf
A new study, released today [1], shows that proposed binding minimum EU recycling targets of 50% for municipal waste [2] by 2020 could save emissions equivalent to more than 89 million tonnes (mt) of CO2 per year. This is the equivalent to taking 31 million cars off the road. The study builds on a UK report [3] which found that most studies showed that recycling was better for the climate than incineration.
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/eu_needs_waste_prevention_14022008.html
Focus is set on recycling of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). The amount of mu-nicipal solid waste increased in the years from 1996 to 2005 between 1.1% per year for as an average. As basis for the calculation of climate protection poten-tials of recycling the waste amount of the year 2005 has been taken as a start-ing point and the assumptions was made that the successful efforts of waste prevention result in stable overall amounts of waste in EU27 in the period under consideration (until the year 2020). If this (optimistic) scenario does not take place (and the waste amount increases further) the potentials of recycling would be even bigger than shown in this report.
http://www.eeb.org/publication/documents/RecyclingClimateChangePotentials.pdf
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Oh dear, heaven protect us from experts.
I beg to differ with these so called experts on global warming. There is no, I repeat NO consensus on global warming. In the USA alone around 33,000 scientists have signed a petition disclaiming that it is caused by us, taking of course that the earth is warming up, all the data I have read seems to be the other way. There is more ice than usual in the arctic according to Norwegian meteorologists. But then what would they know. I end with the following quote:-
‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. —
Prof. P. Stott. Manager of Understanding and Attributing Climate Change at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change at the UK Met Office.
The problem we have is that the whole environmental body has be tied to the AGW bandwagon, in reality the disposal of our rubbish still impacts on our environment whether man made Global Warming is fact or fiction.
The AGW argument is adding to the cost of disposal that we the taxpayer have to bear, that is one point, the other is we need to see if by accepting the whole argument about AGW, the solutions the Government have put in place are successful in their own terms.
On one level in reality it does not matter whether AGW is fact or fiction, because we are being force to pay for the effects of Global Warming so we need to judge the measure by their own standards ie are they doing the job they are supposed to do; are Co2 taxes reducing the world wide output of C02; is recycling reducing the landfill emissions, is the system working.
So does recycling add to the problem or subtract, what are the costs involved, can recycling as the main ingredient, on its own solve the problem?
Are there any other solutions that will help solve the problem?
For my money I do not believe any of the measures introduced will have the effect they are supposed to have; the C02 Taxes will not reduce C02 Levels and recycling is already breaking down and could potentially be adding to the GW problem.