Europe is learning a hard lesson that should never have had to be taught — or, rather, retaught after centuries of human experimentation: burning your trash is not an environmentally friendly activity.

Somehow, the climate lobby managed to convince Europeans otherwise. At least, they were in Spain, where the Gipuzkoa treatment plant incinerates roughly 200,000 tons of waste annually, providing power to approximately 45,000 homes. “The Gipuzkoa plant was meant to be an eco-friendly alternative to landfill, but it’s backfiring,” read one of the least surprising sentences Politico has ever published. Locals allege that the systematic torching of refuse has led to hazardous levels of air, water, and soil pollution.

This Basque village’s experience isn’t unusual. “Across Europe, hundreds of waste-to-energy facilities have mushroomed over the years,” Politico continued. “But studies increasingly find that the pollution generated by these facilities also harms the environment and people’s health.”

That seems intuitive. Indeed, environmental activists and residents of cities that play host to incinerators alike intuited the peril their governments had put them in years ago. Even with mitigation efforts in place, “Dangerous emissions such as dioxin and particulate matter sometimes go unreported, and enforcement is often porous,” the Yale School of the Environment’s Beth Gardiner reported in 2021.

“Evidence shows that waste-to-energy plants are one of the largest source [sic] of environmental contamination as a result of the high amount of dioxin pumped into the air and spread in the surrounding lands and seas,” the environmental activist collective Zero Waste Europe observed six years ago. In 2004, the EU introduced stricter requirements for cleaning and controlling the incineration plants’ emissions. This led to reducing dioxin emissions by 68% in Denmark, nevertheless, according to the [Danish Environmental Protection Agency], the dioxin contamination of the environment has not fallen accordingly.”

The incinerators are probably not going away anytime soon. A lot of money has been sunk into this project — tens of millions of Euros worth — and the continent is going to keep chasing returns. Moreover, Eurocrats have totally arbitrary environmental thresholds to meet. “Plant operators and their investors say these furnaces are essential if Europe wants to meet its goal of sending less than 10 percent of household waste to landfills by 2035,” Politico concluded.

Students of this odd period in human history will ask themselves how many well-intentioned, highly educated reformers convinced themselves that nuclear energy and fossil fuel power generation were so dangerous that the burning waste was a relatively healthful and safe alternative. We seem to be emerging from that delusion, but slowly. And that revelation will have to overcome entrenched financial interests, which have become deeply committed to a madness that prescribes incinerating refuse as a means of environmental remediation. It turns out that idea was just as dumb as it always sounded.