One of my first big jobs as a journalist was to visit a working incinerator in Hampshire and report back.

It was around the time the first plans for the Newhaven incinerator had been put forward.

Veolia, the company behind it, was very keen to show everyone just what a clean and safe operation it would be.

In Hampshire the operation was slick, the PR exemplary and I left wondering what all the fuss was about.

But a little bit of independent research goes a long way and I ended up leaving that first job over a dispute with the owner of the publication, who insisted I report positively on the giant waste burner.

The World Health Organisation classifies dioxins, one of the toxins released by incinerators, as a known carcinogen.

Other arguments say that incineration also runs the risk of reducing or causing a plateau of recycling rates or that, generally, it’s just a really bad idea.

There are more than 100 communities across Britain threatened with having one of these giant waste burners built in their back yard, including Sussex, Surrey, Oxfordshire, East Kent, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.

If ever there was a case in favour of nimbyism (Not In My Back Yard), incinerators are just that.

The big objection comes from the associated health risks.

Councils that want them and the companies which run them are keen to point out the technological advances which make new incinerators less dangerous than the old ones, but others are less enthusiastic.

Dr Vyvyan Howard, a toxicopathologist from the University of Liverpool, said that the emissions from incinerators are full of toxic chemicals which find their way into the food chain and accumulate.

He said: “My researches have led me to the firm conclusion that there is no place for incineration in municipal waste management.”

There have been extensive studies by the World Health Organisation, the Environment Agency and Friends of the Earth examining the health implications of fly ash and particulate matter – other by-products of incinerations – and none concludes that these things will help you live to 100.

But forget the health risks.

Are not the following facts the big issue?

After 16,000 letters of objection to the Newhaven scheme, after a campaign which the High Court noted had generated the most public interest of any planning application ever dealt with by East Sussex County Council, after a network of regional, national and global campaigns against incineration, it is obvious that the people (remember them?

the ones who make a democracy) simply do not want incinerators.

When campaigners challenged the Newhaven scheme in the High Court last week, the judge remarked: “In the real world this is a situation where the local landfill is due to run out in less than a year’s time.”

Perhaps if our leaders had been living in the real world, they would have spent the last few years looking for a genuine solution rather than a boy toy, high-tech way of sweeping the problem under the carpet.

Over the past 30 years, humanity has consumed 30% of the world’s natural resources.

If we carry on as we are, not taking any growth into account, it means we have another 70 years before we’ve used it all up.

Yet all our resources, which are too precious to burn, are going up in smoke.

The situation is baffling at best, farcical at worst. Despite Gordon Brown promising a “green revolution”, the Government is spending £2 billion on incinerators, while at the same time slashing the budget for recycling programmes.

The Environment Department’s recycling development organisation, the Waste Resource and Action Programme, has had its budget cut by 30%, affecting its vital communications work and its home composting scheme.

The innovative National Industrial Symbiosis Programme (NISP) is also suffering.

Industrial symbiosis links businesses which can use each others waste to create new products – for example, waste ceramics and porcelain can be turned into aggregate for decorative landscaping and manufacturing instead of being dumped in landfill or burned.

So far the NISP has prevented two million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, 5.24 million tonnes of virgin material use and diverted 2.95 million tonnes of material from landfill.

Yet it has also just had its budget cut.

Of course the other big issue – certainly for councils eager to be seen as green while simultaneously placating the whims of those for whom putting cardboard in a different bin to plastic is far too stressful – is that municipal waste incinerators allow business as usual.

With the knowledge that everything will just be burnt, turned into fly ash and invisible gas, we become a blameless society, unaccountable for our actions and happy to continue razing the world’s resources until there is nothing left.

At which point we can all hold our hands up and claim it wasn’t our fault.

So the question should not be what to do with all this rubbish but how to live in a world without so much rubbish.

It should be about how to take responsibility for the lives we lead and how to find a way to stop future generations looking back and wondering why we chose the easy route when the solutions lay right in front of us.