Why do we tend to use landfills instead of incineration plants for our trash?

Question

You’d have a lot less to bury if you burned it first, right?

In: 23

Answer 1

Incineration costs money. Landfill makes money.

I work on a quarry, we dig sand and gravel out of the ground, then back fill the holes with building waste.

We charge ~£70 a load to tip waste in there (nothing hazardous, rubble, soil, clay etc) and our last hole took 1 year, at roughly 100 lorries a day.

That’s £7000 a day, for a year… To fill a hole that needed filling anyway.

Then we cover it with 1m of clean clay (from the next hole) 30cm of soil, and it’s back to growing crops (which we feed into a digestion plant to make gas)