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recycling most materials from municipal solid waste saves on average three to five times more energy than does burning them for electricity.

As it turns out, countries with the highest rates of garbage incineration — Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, for example, all incinerate at least 50 percent of their waste — also tend to have high rates of recycling and composting of organic materials and food waste. But zero-wasters argue that were it not for large-scale incineration, these environmentally Zero-waste advocates say a major problem is the long-term contracts that waste-to-energy plants are locked into.conscious countries would have even higher rates of recycling. Germany, for example, incinerates 37 percent of its waste and recycles 45 percent — a considerably better recycling rate than the 30-plus percent of Scandinavian countries.

(In the United States, more than half of all waste is dumped in landfills, and about 12 percent burned, of which only a portion is used to produce energy.)

A new study from the Colorado-based Climate Accountability Institute suggests that 90 companies are responsible for almost two-thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

The top 90 emitters include 50 investor-owned energy companies like BP, ExxonMobil and Shell, along with 31 state-owned companies and some nation-states themselves. 83 of the 90 are coal, oil and gas producers and the remaining seven are cement manufacturers.

Based on studies published during the past several years, the IPCC found that in order to have at least a 66 percent chance of limiting global warming to, or below, 3.6°F above pre-industrial levels, no more than 1 trillion tonnes of carbon can be released into the atmosphere from the beginning of the industrial era through the end of this century.