Much of that bitterly cold easterly wind that froze us through and kept snow on the ground in the week up to Easter had already blown across Denmark, on the other side of the North Sea. Despite this, most of the Danes had kept as warm as toast, with minimum emissions of CO2. So how did they manage that while we were shivering?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that most of their household waste is incinerated and the waste heat put to good use, in district heating schemes, unlike in the UK.

Bradford used to burn all its rubbish in an incinerator, in Hammerton Street, until the mid-Seventies, and at the time I wondered why they just let the heat escape up the chimney, with all the smoke and the dioxins. There was another smaller, private incinerator for medical waste and the like, in Bowling Back Lane, and I had visions of its waste heat producing hot water that could be pumped through local greenhouses to grow out-of-season tomatoes and the like.

Perhaps we need colder winters to encourage us as only one per cent of UK properties are served by such district heating schemes. Most of them are in the Southampton area which uses geothermal power from very deep boreholes, and a combined heat and power scheme, like the one recently cancelled for Calderdale and Bradford.

Sheffield is the other big scheme in the UK, based on waste incineration, but it is insignificant compared with more than 60 per cent of housing in Denmark, and at least half the dwellings in countries such as Poland, though there the heat is produced by using coal.

Burning waste to produce electricity, and heat for local homes, is certainly a very efficient way of getting rid of it, though it still smacks of rather old-fashioned technology. However it does achieve both ambitions without producing additional carbon dioxide, and the fact that the Danes are taking it a step further is promising. They have developed enormous and well-insulated hot water tanks that are heated using the cheap electricity from wind turbines on long and wild winter nights. The hot water is then used to top up the district heating pipes.

However a drawback with waste-dependent schemes is that they are very expensive to build and need constantly feeding. Once a council decides to recycle properly, as seriously as Flanders and San Fransisco with rates closer to 80 than 70 per cent, there’s too little rubbish to burn so combined heat and power plants are not economic.

It’s to be hoped that Bradford’s new recycling rates match the above even though it means that district heating won’t be possible.