Recycling and Waste – to – Energy Incineration: the better alternatives to landfill for the disposal and management of waste.
Although landfill is still the oldest and most common methods of waste treatment by burying the waste materials, its adverse environmental impacts and health impacts such as soil contamination during and after the landfill usage, emission of the methane gas and the harbouring of disease vectors such as rats and flies have pushed for the development of other alternative waste treatment methods such as recycling, waste-to-energy incineration, anaerobic digestion, composting, mechanical biological treatment and plasma arc gasification which have all begun to establish themselves in the market as the better alternative to the traditional landfill.
In recent years, some countries, such as Germany, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland have banned the disposal of untreated waste in landfills. In these countries, only the ashes from incineration or the stabilised output of mechanical biological treatment plants may still be buried in landfills.
