How I learned to love a waste incinerator | Patrick Barkham

Architect Bjarke Ingels has managed to make Copenhagen's waste-to-energy plant good to look at. Why is Britain incapable of making form beautify function?

I was mooching through the centre of Copenhagen last week when my architect friend spotted two chimneys sticking from a sensuous steel building going up just across the water. This is Denmark's new waste-to-energy plant, which in Britain would be called an incinerator.

The Danes are annoyingly incapable of designing anything horrible, and this vast factory, which will burn a quarter of all Denmark's rubbish when it opens next year, is wrapped in a ski slope for the citizens of the capital. The chimneys will periodically emit huge rings of steam (not smoke) to elegantly demonstrate how much carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere by the plant - at one ring per tonne.

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