UCU London Retired Members Branch Opposing the Rebuild of the Edmonton Incinerator

 UCU London Retired Members Branch Opposing the Rebuild of the Edmonton Incinerator 

The London Retired Members Branch of the University and College Union is opposed to the rebuilding of the Edmonton incinerator. The North London Waste Authority (NLWA), on behalf of the seven north London boroughs, plans to replace the current incinerator with a new, much bigger version which will burn rubbish that could otherwise be recycled. 

The toxic pollution, including tiny particle pollution, from this new incinerator will harm everyone who lives, works and studies nearby, in one of London’s most deprived neighbourhoods.. 

The waste incinerator sits in one of the poorest areas of the country, where air pollution already breaches legal limits and we note that UK waste incinerators three times more likely to be in deprived areas. The incinerator is an environmental disaster. Waste incinerators currently release an average of around 1 tonne of CO2 for every tonne of waste incinerated. The release of CO2 from incinerators makes climate change worse and comes with a cost to society that is not paid by those incinerating waste. 

Over the next 30 years the total cost to society of fossil CO2 released by UK's current incinerators would equate to more than £25 billion pounds of harm arising from the release of around 205 million tonnes of fossil CO2. In 2017 the UK's 42 incinerators released a combined total of nearly 11 million tonnes of CO2, around 5 million tonnes of which were from fossil sources such as plastic. In addition to greenhouse gases, incineration releases nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, hydrogen chloride, dioxins, furans, heavy metals, and particulate matter. Electricity generated by waste incineration has significantly higher adverse climate change impacts than electricity generated through the conventional use of fossil fuels such as gas. 

The 'carbon intensity' of energy produced through waste incineration is more than 23 times greater than that for low carbon sources such as wind and solar; as such, incineration is clearly not a low carbon technology. 

 There are many alternatives. Landfill or exporting to poorer countries are not the only alternatives. Alternatives include material recycling facilities, ‘mechanical biological treatment’, steam autoclaving, underground storage of sorted materials, and anaerobic digestion and so on.

 Composition analysis indicates that much of what is currently used as incinerator feedstock could be recycled or composted, and this would result in carbon savings and other environmental benefits. 

We need a system that sorts our rubbish and makes the best use of each type of material. A small portion will still end up landfill or incineration, but at nowhere near the scale NLWA currently has planned.

 This is not merely a question of what type of plant to build. It’s about the type of waste management system that North London boroughs should have. The NLWA wants to spend more than £1 billion of our money on a new incinerator when it could invest that money not only on high-tech sorting and recycling facilities, but also in its people, roughly half of the rubbish going to Edmonton could be recycled if people simply threw it in the right bin.

 If more money were spent on education and awareness raising, much of this ‘rubbish’ could be recycled.

 More details from United Kingdom Without Incineration Network, "Evaluation of the climate change impacts of waste incineration in the United Kingdom" - https://bit.ly/3uvBRnT

 Steve Cushion Branch Secretary, UCU London Retired Members Branch Assistant Secretary, TUC LESE Environmental Sustainability and Just Transition Network