Just beyond the end of Nyhavn, Copenhagen’s colourful canal district, an ominously smoking chimney punctures the horizon between sailboat masts and a cyclists’ bridge. Most tourists in town for one day wouldn’t go much further. But I kept walking, past kindergartens brimming with hygge, through the hippy district of Christiania Freetown, and on to grey apartment blocks in the shadow of a man-made hill: Amager Bakke, or CopenHill. The only energy-from-waste (EfW) incinerator plant with an artificial ski slope on its roof. And one that, under a decade since opening, has gone from green icon to bête noire.
Burning rubbish to create heat and energy was once touted as “renewable”. Now it’s increasingly seen as a major CO2 emitter, local air polluter, and a bad use of perfectly recyclable waste.
I arrive at Amager Bakke, but the place seems deserted—tourist signs usher me towards the ski centre and café, via an elevator to the rooftop viewing balcony. As I ascend, glass walls reveal the inner workings of the plant: huge pipes and steel supports painted white, like the insides of an empty Ikea store. Then the unmistakeable scent of bin lorry seeps in.
Almost immediately after Amager Bakke opened in 2019, Zerowasteeurope.eu published a piece titled “A Danish fiasco: the Copenhagen incineration plant”. In it, they called CopenHill “a technical and financial fiasco, characterised from the outset by poor judgment” which contradicts climate plans. Ironically, the ski slope had made the plant unnecessarily large, and clean-living Danes don’t produce enough waste. It quickly had to rely on imported waste, much of it shipped from the UK.
Zerowasteeurope.eu also pointed out the simple fact that “when we burn plastic, we essentially burn fossil carbon, which has a higher CO2 emission rate.” Politico bemoaned “Denmark’s ‘devilish’ waste dilemma: Its state-of-the-art trash incinerators are sending its climate ambitions up in smoke.” Dan Jørgensen, then Denmark’s climate minister, admitted that “Today, we import waste with a high content of plastic in order to [use the excess] capacity at the incineration plants, with increasing CO2 emission as a result.” Denmark soon announced it would reduce its incineration capacity by 30 per cent and close seven incinerators. The days of CopenHill may already numbered.
And yet energy-from-waste continues to boom in the UK and elsewhere. Waste incineration plants have “surged” in the UK, with the number in England alone rising from 38 to 52 and the volume of incinerated waste more than doubling from seven million to 15m tonnes in the past five years
Kim Pratt, Circular Economy Campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, tells me that “runaway incineration rates are causing climate-wrecking emissions. Incineration is the opposite of renewable because when waste is burnt, it can’t be used again. We are burning valuable resources”. A Zero Waste Scotland study found that 52 per cent of waste put in black bins could have been recycled while, according to the Ferret, 12 per cent of waste separated for recycling also went to energy-from-waste (in Edinburgh, it was as high as 29 per cent). “Governments within the UK, heavily lobbied by waste management companies, have created an artificial market which incentivises incineration,” argues Pratt. “Reuse and recycling solutions have not been promoted.”
Diverting recycling to incineration, the majority of which is plastics derived from crude-oil, has clear climate consequences. Energy-from-waste has now overtaken coal as the UK’s dirtiest form of power.
Days after my alternative Copenhagen tourist trail (I don’t think it will catch on), The Climate Change Committee (CCC) released its long-anticipated Seventh Carbon Budget Advice for the UK government. In it, energy-from-waste came under much-needed scrutiny. The CCC advised that “New EfW plants should only be licensed if a viable route to connecting to CCS [carbon capture and storage] can be established”, warning they could become “stranded assets”. In the last 10 years, “progress in decarbonising the waste sector has stalled. Recycling rates have plateaued and a continued decrease in methane emissions from landfill has been offset by an increase in emissions from incineration, mostly EfW.” The path to net zero only comes with “reducing waste sent to landfill and to EfW”, finds the CCC.
Even when taking into account the potential for neighbourhood heating schemes and electricity generation, energy-from-waste doesn’t stack up. A CCC spokesperson confirms that “the primary use of EfW is to manage waste rather than to produce energy.” Not only that, “EfW plants have been one of the main sources of rising emissions in the UK in recent years and they will need to be decarbonised for the UK to reach Net Zero.” They are a net zero barrier, not an enabler.
The current carbon capture and storage (CCS) rate of EfW in the UK is 0 per cent. It seems fanciful to imagine that it could hit the CCC’s target of 22 per cent by as soon as 2030 and 100 per cent by 2050. Pratt at Friends of the Earth is more derisive. “Adding CCS to incinerators is little more than greenwash”, she says. CCS has a history of “over-promising and under delivering” while “the only proven way to reduce carbon emissions from burning waste is to reduce how much waste we burn in the first place.”
As I exit the lift at the bottom of CopenHill, a handful of after-work skiers arrive. I stay to watch them carve down an artificial slope pockmarked with grass and moss. Above our heads, huge chimneys emit endless clouds of steam and CO2. Our clothes will smell of bin juice when we get home. A prominent sign at the slope’s entrance reads “NO SMOKING OR VAPING. Only our chimneys are allowed to vape.”
