International Review of Waste Management Policy - Department of ...

than greenhouse gases. This is hardly profound (rather, it is tautological). Table 61-2
shows that the unit damage costs for the non-GHG pollutants changed little between
the CSERGE study and the Enviros and EFTEC study. The damage costs for GHGs, on
the other hand, have moved significantly upwards.
Table 61-3: Externalities as reported by HM C&E for Central High Scenario
Externality Externality
Externality
953
Incineration Incineration Incineration with
with
Energy Energy Recovery
Recovery
International Review of Waste Policy: Annexes
Landfill Landfill (medium) (medium) (medium) –
Gas Gas Flared
Flared
Landfi Landfill Landfi ll (medium) – Gas
Gas
Used Used Used to to to Generate Generate
Generate
Electricity
Electricity
Costs -£19.11 -£9.83 -£12.04
of which:
CO2 -£19.09 -£3.82 -£5.73
CH4 -£0.01 -£5.99 -£6.30
VOCs -£0.00 -£0.00 -£0.00
SO2 -£0.01 -£0.02 -£0.01
Health -£0.01 -£0.00 -£0.00
Benefits £6.16 n/a -£2.15
Net Costs -£12.95 -£9.83 -£9.89
Source: HM Customs & Excise (2004) Combining the Government’s Two Heath and Environment
Studies to Calculate Estimates for the External Costs of Landfill and Incineration, December 2004.
Notwithstanding the importance of GHGs, the presumption that ‘only GHGs matter’
would suggest that there were no serious impacts arising from emissions associated
with the incineration or landfilling of household waste stream. If this were the case,
then this would be the first study, to our knowledge, to have arrived at such a
conclusion (since, as discussed above, most studies have steadily expanded their
scope in terms of emissions, and most have taken on board a general drift towards
higher, not lower, unit damage costs). 1171 It might be tempting, on the basis of the
results of this study, to simply concentrate on GHGs and ignore all other emissions
when considering waste management options.
Interrogating these figures and their provenance, it is very difficult to reproduce the
same numbers. The air pollution effects appear to have been miscalculated. In the
1171 The report on the damage costs produced under CAFÉ actually compares the values obtained with
those derived in earlier European work to feed into the BeTa database. Higher end results from the
CAFÉ work are higher than those obtained under the BeTa work by a factor of 2.7 for NOx, 8.7 for
PM2.5, 3.9 for SO2 and 1.4 for VOCs.