Energy recovery facilities play a vital role in our society, safely and reliably treating millions of tonnes of the UK’s residual waste each year.

These facilities are an essential component of the UK’s recycling and waste management ecosystem, which ESA members have invested billions in over the past twenty years – creating thousands of skilled jobs and delivering the modern, effective and high-performing recycling and waste management infrastructure we all benefit from today.

Earlier this week, The Telegraph published a story bearing the headline “The dirty truth about Britain’s waste incinerators” which was largely based on the opinions of a handful of anti-incineration campaigners. Stories like this, which misinterpret and misrepresent the facts around recovering energy from waste, needlessly undermine community confidence in these important facilities and do a great disservice to the thousands of people working diligently to keep them running around the clock, safely putting Britain’s residual waste to best use.

That is why, on behalf of the sector, we have written an open letter to the Editor of The Telegraph Media Group to express our disappointment at the claims published in their article and to encourage them to reconsider their editorial position regarding this vital industry in future.

You can read our full letter here

As a membership body, through our Net-Zero Strategy and Circular Economy Vision 2040, we have set out our sectoral ambitions to achieve net-zero carbon emissions; eliminate avoidable waste; double resource productivity and achieve a national recycling rate of seventy-five per cent for household-like waste by 2040 – ten years ahead of Government targets.

Far from being an impediment to better recycling performance or net-zero targets, recovering energy from waste will continue to play an important and complementary role in the pursuit of these ambitions.