Put together two quite separate news stories of recent weeks and we see yet another terrrifying example of just how dysfunctional our system of government has become. The first story, accompanied last week by startling pictures, concerns the mountains of waste paper collected for "recycling" now piling up in warehouses and dumps across the country, because the bottom has fallen out of the recycling market. Exactly as this column predicted in 2006, the bluff has been called on the "great recycling scam" by the fact that China is no longer willing to take those millions of tons of exported paper which were the only way we could pretend to be meeting our EU recycling targets. As a result, councils must now pay contractors thousands of pounds a week to store waste paper for which there is no market, and because they can no longer even pretend that is being recycled, they further stand to incur fines of hundreds of millions of pounds to Brussels, when penalties for failure to meet our recycling targets kick in from next year. All this might seem ridiculous enough, but when we put this alongside a study published before Christmas by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers we see the full dimensions of what has become a massive national scandal. The ImechE report asks why, unlike other countries in Europe, we are not using some of the 300 million tons of waste we produce each year as fuel to generate large amounts of heat and power. Absurdly, because the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has chosen to classify all this under EU legislation only as "waste", it is far too expensive to burn it as fuel, because this would need to comply with the Waste Incineration directive, requiring hugely expensive scrubbing equipment to avoid pollution. However what Defra, astonishingly, has missed (as also, to be fair, did the ImechE), is that, under EU directive 2001/77, paper, cardboard and other biodegradable waste used for fuel is classified not as waste but as "biomass", counting as a "renewable energy source". The waste incineration directive does not apply. If Defra was capable of reading EU law correctly, what a remarkable prospect this might open up for Britain, and for all those councils which are making such an outrageous mess of our waste disposal. If we consider waste paper and cardboard alone, we produce around 12.5 million tons a year. If all this could be burned as fuel to generate power, its calorific value is up to 60 per cent greater than that of the wood chips ad other vegetable matter we currently use as biomass, to help meet our EU target of 32 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020. Drax in Yorkshire is planning to spend billions on four plants to generate 1.4 gigawatts of electricity from 5.9 million tons of biomass, importing wood chips from Canada and contracting for thousands of acres of English farmland to be switched from producing food to crops for fuel. On these figures, if all those 12.5 million tons of waste paper and cardboard could be used to generate power, 60 per cent more efficiently, it might produce 4.8 gigawatts, more than 10 per cent of our average national electricity needs. This alone would go more than a third of the way to meeting our renewables target, equivalent to the output of more than 10,000 wind turbines. Furthermore, because, under EU law, this is a "renewable" source, it would attract some £2 billion a year in subsidies under the Renewables Obligation. Not only would this soon cover the initial investment in new plant, it could provide local authorities with a handsome profit, instead of having to pay out to cover airfields with unwanted paper, lett alone for the fines soon due to Brussels – all of which will add yet further to those soaring council taxes which last year a staggering 2.5 million homeowners were taken to court for being unable to pay. Yet none of this is happening, for one simple reason: because neither the officials of Defra, nor it seems any of our politicians, are capable of reading one of those EU directives which they are normally so keen to enforce on the rest of us. "Dysfunctional" is too polite a word for so crass a blunder. Last week, as the last available 100 watt tungsten light bulbs flew off supermarket shelves, the British public at last woke up to the consequences of that quixotic decision of 27 EU leaders in March 2007 to phase out the use of incandescent light bulbs. As I reported here at the time, this move to force us all to switch to so-called "low energy" bulbs, as part of a package of measures designed to save us from the global warming which has been so evident in recent days, was ludicrously un-thought through, riddled with practical difficulties and is predictably turning out to be hugely unpopular. But a further twist to the great light bulb fiasco came to light when one of my neighbours last week reported to me the bizarre difficulties he has been having with lighting in his daughter's new home in our Somerset village. Since the house was professionally rewired, they found all the sockets had been changed, so that they can only accommodate bayonet bulbs with three-prongs at the base rather than the usual two. The bulbs to fit these were extremely expensive and hard to track down, but the electricians explained they had been forced to fit the new sockets by "new regulations". Sure enough, after a little investigation, it turns out that in 2002 the Government sneaked in an amendment to the building regulations, "L1", without reference to Parliament, requiring all "newbuild" homes to be fitted with a sample of the new sockets, the express purpose being that they can only use "energy efficient" bulbs, thus forcing homeowners to use them whether they like it or not. As so often, however, this is now being over-zealously interpreted to mean that the new sockets must be fitted not only throughout all new homes but also to older properties being rewired, which, as my neighbour found, presents a nasty problem, Not only are the new "BC3" bulbs hard to find and expensive (£8.32 is the cheapest price on the internet), but, staggeringly, they seem to be made by only one firm, Eaten of Manchester, which must be enjoying quite a bonanza. Fortunately for my neighbour's daughter, her father is a capable handyman who has spent hours changing all the sockets back again (quite illegally, since he hasn't got the meaningless and very expensive "Part P" certification also now required for doing such work under EU-related regulations). But others will not be so lucky. And since when was it the purpose of legislation to enrich a single company – even in the name of saving the planet?
Why are we not using waste as fuel to generate heat and power?
DEFRA must start reading EU law properly and realise we could use waste to heat our homes, writes Christopher Booker.
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