Landfill-free Bristol by 2014

My Lib Dem colleague Councillor Gary Hopkins announced today Bristol will stop sending domestic rubbish to landfill sites within the next three years. This is obviously fantastic news and the love will be spread to the neighbouring council areas too.

From June, about half of Bristol's waste will go to a mechanical biological treatment plant that has just been built in Avonmouth. This effectively sorts the waste that's in black bins using clever things like magnets and airblowers to get more recyclables out. It is then pushed through a composter, producing a renewable fuel source and compost as the two outputs.

The other half is going to landfilled for two years while a second plant is built - this time just a materials recovery facility, which is effectively the same as the first stage described above. Once this is online, anything that can't be recovered will be turned into renewable fuel for the pyrolysis plant that recently got planning permission. I think I heard that they will even dig up the two years' worth of landfill and process that retrospectively!

I hope you followed all that! I should have prefaced the explanation with a big "As I understand it...". Waste isn't my area of responsibility and the new green tech that's being used is a lot more scientifically complex than the old options of burn it or stick it in the ground. So, apologies if I've got any of the details mangled, but the basic story is sound: landfill-free by 2014.

Waste is rarely sexy, but this is great news and Gary deserves a lot of credit for pushing this through against all the 'easy' options and for bringing our neighbours with us. Bristol will be one of the first, if not the first, major UK city to be free from landfill and incineration, with the additional outputs of more recycling, free compost and renewable energy production - and with less cost to the taxpayer and less pollution. It puts Bristol firmly at the green cutting edge.

(An irony is that this will have no impact on our official carbon footprint as waste disposal is not included in the calculation. It might not help us to meet the 40% carbon cut target that we've adopted, but in the real world, this will save vast amounts of carbon and methane.)

Two years ago, Labour were thrown out of running the city after the Tories finally switched sides and voted them down due to their bullish plans to build a dirty and expensive PFI incinerator. I remember the shroud waving so well... apparently we had to build an incinerator and burn all the city's waste on a big bonfire or Bristol would be in awful trouble and go bust through landfill taxes and various other vague threats. Today has finally proved them wrong.