Landfill bans seem to be fashionable at the moment. I’ve tried to understand why, but I can’t think of a good reason.

A ban is a draconian measure. It’s the type of measure that you resort to when dealing with things or activities that pose major hazards to people – like asbestos or organophosphate pesticides – or society – like not wearing a seatbelt. Though there are undoubtedly better things to do with waste than landfilling, it doesn’t seem to me that landfilling belongs in this category, or, if it does, then so do several other waste management operations.

Landfill bans have been touted recently by, amongst others, the European Commission (EC) and the Green Alliance. The Green Alliance pamphlet makes a case for landfill bans based on the value of materials that could be recycled. But this is the mistake everyone keeps making: landfill bans equal more recycling. Actually, all that a ban on landfill would do is stop the material going to a landfill. Who’s to say that it wouldn’t be incinerated instead?

The Green Alliance report also focuses on a few specific materials. But how would you ban a specific material from landfill if it’s generally dispersed in residual waste rather than turning up in obvious batches? The EC’s consultation on plastics asked consultees whether a landfill ban for plastic would be a proportionate solution. How would you ban – that is, eliminate – plastics from landfill? How much residual waste contains no plastic? You might as well ban everything (and you’d probably have to), so it’s hardly a proportionate solution.

And if you ban the lot, then what? Every country that has implemented a meaningful landfill ban now has overcapacity in incineration. It’s not difficult to see why. If a landfill ban is enforced, then there has to be enough treatment capacity to manage residual waste when the ban comes into effect. Even supposing that this calculation could be made ‘exact’ at that point, what would happen if recycling or reuse rates had not reached their limit, or if waste quantities fell, or any combination of these? It’s easy to see why overcapacity is an almost inevitable side effect of landfill bans.

What then happens? Well, the same as with any goods or service in oversupply: the price falls. Some suppliers might go out of business, some assets might get picked up at bargain prices, but, on the spot market, lower prices for residual waste would diminish the incentive to prevent it, prepare it for reuse or recycle it. But surely, the ban will increase recycling? Well, let’s think about that for a second (we won’t need more than that). Before the ban takes effect, it may do if the price of landfilling is much less than alternative residual waste treatments. If it isn’t, however, there would be no compelling financial logic to increase recycling. In the UK, the prices of landfill and other residual waste treatment options are more or less at parity because of the landfill tax. The ban would provide no additional financial incentive.

What other incentive for recycling could a ban provide? Well, some operators might ensure they were not ‘caught short’ of capacity by recycling more, but only if the required treatment capacity was not coming forward quickly enough. Presumably, the chances of this happening would be diminished with longer lead-in time, particularly where the export market provides another outlet for waste.

Here’s the strangest thing about the EC’s apparent obsession with landfill bans: the only comparative work of any detail it has conducted on landfills and incineration was more than a decade ago, and suggested that the differences between their environmental costs were rather small. Where plastics are concerned, its work clearly indicated that a switch from landfill to incineration would be a disaster from the perspective of climate change. The EC’s policy recommendations fly in the face of its own analysis.

Perhaps the only attraction of a ban is in terms of a political slogan. But there is a yawning chasm separating casual slogans from wellconceived policy. We should be banning the sloganeering, not landfilling.