LAST week, the international environmental organization GAIA launched "The Burn Book: Incinerators that Threaten the Climate, Public Health, and Our Finances." The launch was timed with the opening of this year’s Global Week of Action to Stop Incineration.
For The Burn Book, GAIA examined data from 20 incinerators, including a few still being built and one already closed. Some of the plants in operation are decades old, while others are from the 2020s. The study’s focus is on public debt and subsidies; climate and air pollution; and toxic byproducts. Despite differences in location, capacity, technology, age, financing, ownership and other factors, certain “key patterns” emerged. “Waste incinerators are the most expensive form of waste management,” GAIA not surprisingly concluded. In short, incineration is a colossal “waste of money.” Aside from turning “waste into toxic air and ash pollution,” incineration has “a large climate footprint.”
Of course, we expect to hear this from GAIA. Critics of the organization and The Burn Book might allege that GAIA deliberately selected the most polluting, poorly operated incinerators as case studies. However, GAIA’s point by presenting these 20 case studies from across the globe is to demonstrate that — over a period of time that spans more than two generations — “decisions about incineration are not only technical decisions about waste disposal, they are also decisions about financing, environmental review, cumulative impacts, and whose voices shape infrastructure that may operate for decades.”
When governments, be they local or national, decide to invest in incineration, they commit substantial public resources. Obligations in connection with loans, take-or-pay provisions in contracts, or operational subsidies are borne not only by today’s taxpayers and constituents, but future ones as well. But worse than staggering financial obligations that take away scarce resources from other public services such as health care and education is the toxic legacy.
The Vallon Incinerator Plant in Lausanne, Switzerland — the only closed facility among the 20 incinerators discussed in The Burn Book — shut its doors in 2005 after 47 years in operation. In the early 1980s, heavy metal pollution had been addressed with the installation of wet scrubbers. All seemed good. So it came as a shock when, in 2021, it was discovered — by “sheer chance” — that soil in the area was contaminated with dioxins and furans. These highly toxic chemicals, known as persistent organic pollutants, are byproducts of industrial processes including incineration. “As we did not look for dioxins, we never found them,” Natacha Litzistorf, a local city councilor and environmentalist, told AFP in 2021 (reported in RFI, Oct. 16, 2021).
We don’t find what we aren’t looking for.
This also worries people in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in the US. The incinerator at the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center has been operating since 1989. The Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution in 2024 to end the incinerator’s use by December 2027. However, the Hennepin County local government itself wants better waste reduction and recycling programs to be in place before the incinerator is closed. Without a transition toward a zero-waste system, the trash will simply go to the landfill instead (KARE11, June 12, 2026).
The fear of toxic emissions and incinerator ash, however, makes residents demand the facility’s closure next year. They want continuous monitoring of more than 20 pollutants until such time. The emission testing at the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center reportedly is limited to an annual test of “a handful of pollutants” only.
Annual testing “provides only a limited snapshot of facility operations and may not capture temporary pollution spikes during equipment startups, shutdowns, and functions,” explained Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman, a retired US Environmental Protection Agency risk scientist (Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, Sept. 30, 2026). Dr. Sherman, together with other members of Zero Burn Coalition, attended the Hennepin County budget meeting to make their voices heard.
Incidentally, the intention of Hennepin County, Minneapolis, and Minnesota to transition to a zero-waste system and eventually scrap incineration is hardly empty talk. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is supporting waste reduction, recycling and composting initiatives with grants. One of these initiatives is the monthly public Swap-It event organized by Hennepin County and the Reuse Minnesota network. Each Swap-It event has its own theme: building materials, toys, holiday decors, kitchen gadgets, etc. People can save money and avoid waste. It was one of the zero waste stories shared during the BYO US Reduces Oct. 6 online gathering about Simplifying the Holidays.
GAIA is against incineration, but it also points to the alternative: Governments must “invest further upstream: preventing unnecessary products and packaging, expanding reuse and refill, separating food and other organics, improving recycling, and designing systems that keep materials circulating.” The Burn Book reminds us that the “measure of a successful waste management system should not be how efficiently it burns an endless supply of discarded materials, but how little waste it produces in the first place.” We must waste less and manage our natural, economic and financial resources sustainably to beat climate change and toxic pollution, and to improve the quality of life for all.
