The Climate Cost of Burning Waste

The carbon intensity of waste-to-energy incinerators in Delhi, and why incinerators should not be funded as climate action.

Waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration is increasingly promoted as a way to address three problems at once: reduce the volume of waste sent to landfills, generate electricity, and contribute to climate mitigation. This framing is particularly influential in the Global South, where growing waste volumes, pressure on urban landfills, and demand for infrastructure have created a market for large-scale incineration. Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and international climate finance are also increasingly financing WTE incineration in the Global South countries even as the Global North countries such as the US, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Japan are increasingly phasing out these incinerators. This report examines the climate credentials of WTE incinerators through a detailed case study of the four operational WTE incinerators in Delhi.

The major objective of the report is to uncover the real carbon intensity of the electricity produced from Delhi’s WTE incinerators. Delhi provides an important case because its waste stream shares characteristics common to many Global South cities: it is heterogeneous and relatively moisture-rich, with limited source segregation and weak regulatory enforcement. Drawing on data from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC), Delhi Electricity Regulatory Commission (DERC), waste-management records, UNEP-IPCC guidelines, and published scientific literature, this report estimates fossil-origin CO₂ emissions from plastics burned at Delhi’s four WTE plants and compares these emissions with the electricity generated and exported by the facilities.

The central finding is the fossil carbon intensity of WTE plants producing electricity.The study estimates that combustion of the fossil-derived fraction of the waste in the WTE incinerators produces approximately 3.4kg of fossil-origin CO₂ for every kWh of net electricity exported by the plants.  This is approximately 4.7 times the Central Electricity Authority’s weighted-average emission factor for Indian grid electricity (0.727 kg CO₂/kWh in FY2023–24) and approximately 3.5 times the emission factor for coal (0.978 kg CO₂/kWh). The estimated net electricity exported by the four plants corresponds to approximately 198 kWh per tonne of raw municipal solid waste, which is less than one-third of yields reported in some Western WTE systems. Thus, Delhi demonstrates that while incineration has the highest carbon burden, it also produces a dismal amount of energy.

Furthermore, the study exposes a fundamental problem with describing mixed-waste incineration as renewable energy. In 2023, the four Delhi WTE plants burned approximately 735,840 tonnes of plastic, with plastics constituting roughly 42% of the estimated refuse-derived fuel (RDF) feed. Since plastics are predominantly fossil-derived, the report questions whether electricity generated by combusting such large amounts of plastics should receive the regulatory and financial advantages associated with renewable energy.

The report also identifies a “plastic paradox,” whereby India’s Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework creates economic value for the downstream combustion of plastic, allowing producers to fulfil EPR obligations without necessarily reducing plastic production at the source or shifting towards reuse, refill, and better packaging.

These risks of incineration extend beyond greenhouse gas emissions to public health, environmental pollution, and livelihood disruption. The Okhla WTE plant, for example, recorded dioxin and furan emissions at nearly nine times permitted levels in a 2020 CPCB inspection, while a recent New York Times investigation raised concerns about toxic heavy-metal exposure affecting more than one million residents living around the plant.

The report therefore recommends that municipal waste incineration should be excluded from climate finance; carbon crediting of municipal waste incineration should end; mixed-MSW incineration should be removed from renewable-energy and green-energy classifications; EPR systems should not reward plastic combustion; climate finance should prioritise demonstrable zero-waste systems; and public finance should support the safe closure, decommissioning and just transition of existing incinerators. Climate finance should be aligned with waste prevention, material circularity, protection of waste-worker livelihoods and genuine emissions reduction rather than with the expansion of infrastructure that depends on continued waste generation.