Paul Connett

Connett's case against incineration has two parts. An economic one: an incinerator requires a waste supply contract of twenty or thirty years, so the municipality is obliged to produce rubbish to feed it and loses any incentive to reduce it. And a material one: burning makes nothing disappear, it leaves toxic ash that has to be buried and emits into the air part of what it contained.

Against that he proposes a ten-step strategy beginning with separate door-to-door collection, continuing through composting the organic fraction, pay-as-you-throw charging, repair and reuse centres, and ending in a screening facility that analyses what still cannot be recycled in order to tell the manufacturer what to redesign. The goal is not a percentage but progressively eliminating the need for landfill and incinerator.

Born in the United Kingdom in 1940, Connett holds a doctorate in chemistry and is professor emeritus at St. Lawrence University in New York State. He has spent three decades touring city councils and community meetings worldwide, more as a populariser and campaigner than as a researcher.

His most cited case is Capannori in Tuscany, the first European municipality to declare itself zero waste in 2007, which passed 80% separate collection, and the Italian Zero Waste network that grew around it. It is worth knowing that Connett is also a controversial figure: for years he has led the international campaign against water fluoridation, a position rejected by the main public health authorities and independent of his work on waste.