A woman from north London is taking legal action against her local council to try to block the construction of a 700,000-tonne-a-year rubbish incinerator.
Dorothea Hackman, 69, a church warden and head of the Camden civic society, is the claimant in a judicial review challenging the decision to award the £755m contract to replace and extend the electricity from the waste incinerator in Edmonton, one of the country’s poorest areas.
“It’s sort of like buying a bigger digger for these boys,” she said. “I’ve just bought a bigger digger for my two-year-old grandson, he was ecstatic. This is what the Edmonton incinerator reminds me of. They’ve got one that pollutes, and should be replaced, but what it should be replaced with is a state-of-the-art recycling centre.”
The Edmonton incinerator, which opened in 1971, is the oldest in the UK, and one of the oldest in Europe. It currently burns about 500,000 tonnes of rubbish a year, but is due to reach the end of its life in 2025.
Opponents have fought a rearguard action in an effort to stymie the replacement project since planning permission was granted in 2017. But the board of the North London Waste Authority (NLWA), the publicly owned consortium that runs the incinerator, agreed in December to a contract with Acciona, a Spanish firm, to build the plant.
In a pre-action letter to the NLWA, Hackman claims its board, which is made up of representatives from seven local councils, were not given the full facts on which to decide on the contract.
A report by the authority misled councillors about the scale of the pollution from the proposed incinerator, Hackman’s letter claims, with the 28,000-tonnes-a-year figure given amounting to a fraction of the 683,000 tonnes implied by the independent carbon screening report on which it was based.
Councillors were also misled, according to the letter, on the plant’s readiness for carbon capture and sequestration technology, and by the claim that installing such machinery would “likely make the facility carbon negative”.
“On 16 December, the NLWA met in Camden and they were given disinformation,” Hackman said. “They were led to believe that carbon capture could happen, and there is basically no provision for it.”
The proportion of the UK’s household waste that goes to landfill has plummeted since the beginning of the century. But while Britons now recycle about three times as much, growth in recycling has been flat for a decade. The gap has been filled by incineration. Across the UK last year, 41% of waste was recycled, and 48% was burned; in London, the worst performing region, 64% was burned.
“We [in London] are currently recycling less than 30%,” Hackman, a retired teacher, who has lived in Camden for 45 years, said. “Areas without incinerators in the UK already recycle 60%, and that can be improved.”
Hackman and fellow activists point to research suggesting incineration can cause a range of ill-effects to the health of people living nearby. In December a cross-party group of MPs said incinerator expansion should be halted immediately to protect human health and cut carbon emissions. There are 90 incinerators across the UK, with 50 more planned.
Hackman said: “Above all we need to stop manufacturing plastic, we can’t keep on with the plastic; we’ve got to, and we should, stop it. At the moment we are burning plastic for our heat and energy and I can’t think of anything more insane. We would be better off burning coal.”
NLWA says the plant “exceeds statutory requirements” and “will be the safest and cleanest in the UK”, while supplying electricity for up to 127,000 homes and heating 50,000. The consortium has pointed to an analysis by Imperial College London researchers, funded by Public Health England, that found no link between exposure to emissions from municipal waste incinerators and infant deaths – an effect cited by opponents.
The development also includes £100m of new recycling centres – “London’s largest public investment in recycling facilities for decades”, NLWA says – which are intended to help achieve a recycling rate for the area of 50%.
A NLWA spokesperson said it stood by the validity of the decision to enter into the contract with Acciona. “We are entirely satisfied that the decision our members took … was the right one and was properly taken,” the spokesperson said.
“This is a world-class infrastructure project that presents the best environmental, technical and economic solution to the treatment of waste in north London.”
