I tried to talk about working incenerators and incenerator technology development in the Italian version of the Grillo post “See Brescia and Die“. But Beppe didn’t like my comment for some reason. The Daily Owl-blogger discovered the disappearal. I really feel flattered. But Beppe Grillo seems not to be open for dialogues. If you are able to read Italian read the article “Piovono rane” (Frogs are raining) on l’Espresso written by Alessandro Giglioli. Well, my comment being refused, I thought maybe it was more accepted in the English version of the Grillo blog, were most Italians are not able to read.

The Terni-incenerator scandal is not an example of incenerator technology. That is an example of criminal administration. And about the incenerator in Brescia I can’t argue.

But I live near an incenerator and want to tell that the incenerator technology has developed quite a lot. You can see by the photos in my previous post the luxury “acceptance” of this plant. As the previous commenter, Andrea Ceccanti said, it is not the best good solution to burn wastes. But what are the alternatives?

Andrea Ceccanti said this in his intresting comment in “Sea Brescia and die“:

As far as the energy calculation is concerned I totally agree with you that an incinerator is inefficient. However, please do not forget that the incinerator is supposed to reduce the volume of waste and not producing energy. Energy production is a job for power plants and sometime they are not efficient either. However, having an incinerator that can produce some energy is a clear advantage.
From the pollution point of view, incinerators represent an unfortunate choice for our environment and ourselves. Unfortunately, the alternative to incinerators is a rubbish dump that has its own problems as well. In any case an incinerator could provide a reasonable mean of waste disposal if combined with a separate waste collection. In actual fact the environmental impact of burning paper, wood, non-synthetic clothes, kitchen waste and cardboard is minimal and surely lower than the million of cars that roam Italian roads every day.
The process becomes dangerous when burning plastics (especially PVC), plastic bags, plastic wrapping, certain type of rubber (like those of electric cables) and many other man made products that combined with oxygen produce Dioxin. The open battle against incinerators is important but dramatically fails to provide a short term solution. The average family produces at least a couple of bags of rubbish a week. What are we going to do with the resulting 40 million bags of rubbish a week? Talking about separate collection and recycling is fine but how many Italians will separate and recycle? Probably the same percentage of the Italian drivers that drive carefully…

A Swedish environmental group, Naturskyddsföreningen, cooperating with Greenpeace, talks about 5 problems with incinerators. One of these is about the environmental impact, among others, the fact that the biggest part of dioxine, with the new air filtering techniques, are to be found in the ashes. The ashes should according to Greenpeace, be burried in stone galleries like radioactive materials.