Fired-up Greens angry about £2bn incinerator deal
BUT COUNCIL DEFENDS PLAN
PLANS for a £2bn incinerator to burn rubbish from across the North East have been slammed by green activists.
A 40-year project to burn waste from Newcastle, Durham, Darlington, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Stockton and Redcar and Cleveland was announced last week with a promise that it was “better for the environment” than sending rubbish to landfill.
But opponents have condemned the decision, which will see 450,000 tonnes of waste a year being burned, as an environmental failure.
The Newcastle Green Party’s Andrew Gray said the council’s involvement was evidence it had “given up on a sustainable waste strategy” and failed to learn from the Byker ash scandal.
Newcastle City Council was prosecuted in 2000 after 2,000 tonnes of ash from the Byker incinerator, which had been spread on more than 20 allotments, was found to contain potentially cancer-causing dioxins.
Mr Gray said: “It has failed to follow its own Newcastle Waste Commission recommendation for a reuse mall, it has failed to have any ambition to reduce waste levels, it has failed to learn from the Byker Incinerator scandal of 20 years ago.”
The council said it was “ridiculous” to compare the new facility to the old Byker incinerator and “utter codswallop” to think all waste will be recycled or reused in the near future.
The Greens have argued that being tied to a
Andrew Gray decades-long incineration deal will make it harder to pursue other efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle rubbish.
Mr Gray also criticised the labelling of the incinerator – which will be based at the South Tees Development Corporation area, in Redcar – as an “energy recovery facility”.
He added: “20 years ago, councils began to call their waste incinerators ‘energy from waste’ plants because it sounded better. Now that the public has seen through that euphemism, they have adopted another one, ‘energy recovery facility.’”
Newcastle’s Liberal Democrat opposition have also questioned how the incinerator will help the council achieve its goal of recycling 50% of household waste this year.
Coun Gareth Kane, the opposition’s environment spokesman, said: “It’s not clear how this announcement fits within the context of the council’s Waste Strategy.
“The problem with building a new facility is that it will lock the city into sending waste for incineration for decades, making it difficult to exploit greener opportunities as they emerge.”
Coun John-Paul Stephenson, the Labour council’s cabinet member for environment and regulatory services, said the authority was increasing the amount of waste reused, recycled or composted and that the facility “does not affect the scope” of such plans.
He said: “Of course in a perfect world we would recycle or reuse 100% of the waste we produce but to think that is actually achievable in the near future, or we can reach our environmental aims through community engagement alone, is utter codswallop.”
Coun Stephenson added: “To compare a new, modern, £300m energy recovery facility with the much less efficient energy from waste plants of the recent past, let alone something from 40 years ago, is ridiculous.
“The Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility project in no way encourages us to maintain or increase our residual waste – though as the city’s population grows it will inevitably go up, even if the amount per household hopefully goes down.”