The group will be exhibiting at the conference, which is to be opened by environment minister John Gormley tomorrow, in the hope of persuading policy-makers to favour incineration over the minister's preferred waste treatment technology, Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT).

CEWEP will also be distributing a briefing paper to participants, which contains extracts from the recent fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which it claims backs incineration.

According to CEWEP, the extracts prove that the IPCC "considers waste to energy to be a greenhouse gas mitigation technology for the waste sector. This is because it emits less greenhouse gases than landfill and generates renewable energy that offsets fossil fuel emissions".

According to Jackie Keaney, CEWEP's vice-president for Ireland, the organisation hopes to show that incineration is a better option than MBT in terms of the country meeting its climate change obligations.

"You have two options with black bin waste: you could send it to MBT, where 3% would be recovered as recyclable with the remainder ending up in landfill, or you can send it to waste to energy, " she said.

"Seventy per cent of black bin waste is biodegradable, which means that it is essentially carbon neutral if treated through waste to energy but if you put it in landfill, it produces methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas."

Keaney said that although there were methods by which methane and other gases produced by landfills could be extracted and used to generate electricity, they were not as energy- or cost-efficient as incineration.

"For residual waste, waste to energy comes out on top when it comes to mitigating climate change, " she said.