| Community ownership? |
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Our acceptance of a WtE plant in our community, particularly it is in keeping with the rest of our neighbourhood, may be helped if we can have a say in its running, or even if we can enjoy some of its benefits. These may include heat for our homes and businesses or electricity which is free, or at a reduced price. After all, it is our waste that we provided for it! The concept of community ownership has been more commonly applied to small wind farms, where local people have bought shares in the scheme and benefited from the sale of green electricity. There is no reason why this should not be extended to WtE, another source of energy from our own backyards. In Denmark, it is common for the local authority to own their WtE plant. This ensures that a good price for the service is obtained for local taxpayers. Denmark has one of the lowest WtE costs in Europe.1 One of the concerns of larger plants, is that they require far greater sums of money in order to develop them. Often, the only organisations capable of raising such sums are the large waste management companies who have to answer their own shareholders with dividends. Effectively, this may encourage most of the benefits away from the local neighbourhood, in which the plant is situated. In order to keep the benefits of WtE in our own backyard, we can ask our councils to build and own the facilities that will process our waste. They may also allow us to buy shares, or even let us develop our own facility, in order that we can take responsibility, ourselves, for our town or district’s waste arising. In Denmark, council or community owned plants have provided the benefit of lower fees for recovering energy from the waste. It is perhaps no surprise, that there is much more local support and lower opposition to WtE there!
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