Waste incinerators – are we seeing democracy go up in smoke?

Thursday, September 25, 2008

As the Audit Commission urges councils to ramp up efforts to turn waste into energy or face hefty fines, Dr Andy Tubb, Shlomo Dowen and Joshua Dowen complain that councils often sign up to waste contracts without any consultation with the local community

We like to think we live in a democracy where environmental decision-making benefits from due consideration of stakeholders’ freely-formed perspectives. When representatives do not treat the electorate as stakeholders and do not seek their views, the public interest is not served. Trust is eroded, poor decisions are made and people’s rights under the Aarhus Convention are not honoured.

Important environmental decisions, about waste management for example, are being made behind closed doors. The public is excluded and so becomes unwilling to own these decisions. Furthermore, the electorate is unable to make an informed judgement about whether or not their interests are represented.

Even when elected representatives are made aware of local opposition to contentious proposals like waste incineration, a ‘leave it to the officers’ culture puts democratic influence further out of reach for those who should be treated as valued stakeholders. Waste collection depends on unpaid cooperation and ongoing financing from millions of householders. Householders become modern-day waste slaves - forced to segregate discarded material, exploited for the profit of a few multi-national waste companies.

This democracy deficit is made worse by officers who adopt an ‘industry knows best’ mindset. Instead of listening to local people’s concerns, poor decisions are defended, and trust between a community and its public servants is eroded. Citizens come to feel that their officers are working for the waste companies. In some cases, sincere attempts to engage positively with local authority officers are repeatedly rebuffed or dealt with using rigged stakeholder meetings where a specific few are selectively ignored.

Waste PFI contracts commit a council to specific approaches to dealing with waste for decades. These contracts, which may contradict or ‘replace’ democratically agreed waste strategies, can be entered into without meaningful consultation and without stakeholders being able to see what has been agreed on their behalves. These contracts, if they include incineration, pose financial, environmental and political risks to councils.

Councils are bullied by threats of enormous £150 per tonne fines for failing to meet landfill reduction targets and by exaggerated accounts about insufficient landfill space, based on unreliable predictions of future waste arising and LATS credit valuations. While local authorities are under pressure to finalise new waste strategies, government agencies are slow to validate research that identifies the most sustainable waste management practices. Offers of PFI credits drive projects in the wrong direction – towards oversized incinerators.

Waste incineration is an expensive way to divert waste from landfill. Incineration is also an expensive way to divert waste from reuse and recycling. Incineration entails high costs and high opportunity costs, with council’s contractually obliged to burn valuable resources whilst foregoing income associated with their reuse. Local anti-incineration groups will campaign to ensure the public see incinerator proposals as controversial, meaning ‘slippage’ is also inevitable.

As time passes, costs rise and circumstances change. Earlier assumptions are proved wrong, as waste arising is less than predicted, recycling increases more quickly than expected, the government offers double ROC’s (enhanced financial incentives) for anaerobic digestion (AD), incineration taxes are introduced, emissions limits are reduced, efficiency requirements are increased, etc. As demand for incineration lessens, over-sized facilities cannot be scaled down, and problems arise for the operators when commercial and industrial waste is used to replace household waste (eg in Sheffield).

Claims that bonfire-in-a-box incineration is a tried and tested (and in the long-term more profitable!) technology adds to the pressure used to make councils sign up to the magical Energy-from-Waste incinerator contract to deal with the terrifying residual waste stream. It’s a con like most other magic tricks.

Whatever enters the incinerator leaves the facility, either to landfill or ‘sky-fill’. Carbon dioxide, dioxins and acid gases are not present in the waste; they are all created by the burning. Burning plastic inefficiently in incinerators is not the way to manage residual wastes, making it much harder to meet climate change targets. Disposing of a community’s wastes may be their biggest contribution to climate change.

Burning waste is an inefficient and relatively dirty way to generate energy. Incinerators are rarely able to achieve more than 22 per cent efficiency in the long term. Compared with modern power stations this is pants! European policy expects a facility to be more than 65 per cent efficient to count as an energy recovery facility.

Dr Andy Tubb is senior lecturer in Environmental Science at the University of the West of England, Shlomo Dowen is national network coordinator at United Kingdom Without Incineration Network (www.ukwin.org.uk) and Joshua Dowen is UKWIN technical supervisor