The official line is “modern incinerators are clean”. The need to meet stringent EU emissions guidelines has forced UK incineration companies to clean up their acts. The Health Protection Agency has given them a thumbs-up, so nevermore can pollution be used to justify refusing permission to build an incinerator.

The truth is, of course, far more complex. As we’ve written elsewhere on this site, a lot of incinerators are not well run. And thanks to an industry insider, the Private Eye article sheds more light on quite how shoddy the industry practices can get.

Regulations in the USA require continuous monitoring of emissions of PM2.5 at incinerators – that’s pollution which consists of particles less than 2.5 microns (0.0025mm) in diameter. These measures came in despite protests by incineration companies because medical studies showed clearly the dangers posed by PM2.5 pollution.

Here in the UK, PM2.5 pollution is only measured once a year, and on a date decided by the incinerator operator. This allows the operator to manipulate the type and amount of rubbish being burnt at the time, and the temperature acheived in the process at the time. Worse, if the test is failed there is no requirement to inform the Environment Agency, provided a subsequent test is successful.

There are 62 monitoring stations in the UK which continuously measure PM2.5s. None of them is anywhere near an incinerator.

The upshot is a brilliant arrangement for the incineration companies – the guidelines allow them to sail through the planning process, and once through, slack monitoring and enforcement give them the license to pollute.

This article appeared in Private Eye #1311.

The Council said no, Biogen appealed, Eric Pickles said still no.

Here’s the interesting thing: one of the factors in the refusal was the prematurity of the scheme, given progress on a waste core strategy (WCS) for the area. Bedford was putting the cart before the horse, deciding to build a gasification incinerator before reallly looking at how much waste they can recycle. The sharp among you will immediately realise that this is exactly what’s happened here. The North Yorkshire Waste (and Minerals) Framework is waayy behind schedule, having been thrown out by a Government inspector in 2008. Which makes this plan absolutely premature – one of the points raised by our letter to Eric Pickles calling for a Public Inquiry (which you can still download and send!).

Not a single member of the planning committee spoke in favour of the scheme, which was roundly criticised on financial, planning, environmental, heritage, landscape and health grounds. Several speakers expressed the view that the planning application should be called in by the Secretary of State and determined at an independent inquiry, among them North Yorkshire County Councillor John Watson, who also put a strongly worded case against the scheme on financial grounds.

Our sister campaign, the North Yorkshire Waste Action Group, held a peaceful protest outside the meeting.

Whilst the planning decision will ultimately be made by North Yorkshire County Council, the objections of the local planning authority carry significant weight. In the event on NYCC granting approval, the application is now far more likely to be called in for a public inquiry.

Read the story on the Ripon Gazette website.

See video of the protest at the meeting on the Yorkshire Post website.

Friends of the Earth are running an online petition calling on Caroline Spelman (Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) to divert food waste into animal feed and compost, instead of incineration or landfill.

16 million tonnes of food is wasted each year, with much of it ending up in incinerators, whilst we import intensively-farmed animal feeds. It’s an obvious thing to fix, and it would reduce the need for incinerators still further!

So sign the petition – and why not take the opportunity to congratulate Ms Spelman on her decision to put the kibosh on the unwanted Norfolk incinerator?

The link is here: Feed farm animals, not incinerators.

As reported in The Independent, County Councillor Bill Borrett (the Conservative Cabinet Member for Environment & Waste) said:

“By taking this approach, the Secretary of State will send shivers down the spine of all other authorities with major waste treatment proposals in the pipeline…”

Like North Yorkshire, of course, where we have over 10,000 signatures opposing the proposal.

The move does support both the austerity and localism agenda. In times of austerity and falling waste volumes, these unwanted big-box schemes cannot be justified.

So we need to make sure that the Government realises that opposition here in Yorkshire is just as fierce as in Norfolk. Please help oppose the plans by writing to your MP, Secretary of State Eric Pickles – and Caroline Spelman too.

See also the story as reported on the Eastern Daily Press.

The reference for the application is NY/2011/0328/ENV – it is important that you quote this. The application can be viewed on North Yorkshire County Council’s Planning Portal – you can object here online also. If you prefer, you can write to the case officer by post:

Shaun Robson, Planning Services, Business and Environmental Services Directorate, County Hall, Northallerton DL7 8AH

Or by email to: allertonwaste@northyorks.gov.uk

You will have your own reasons for opposing the application. Our reasons include:

• The proposed scheme will cause serious harm to the landscape, environment and economy
• Mitigation proposals are inadequate to offset this harm
• Need is not proven; the facility is too large, no business case is provided
• The case for the selected technology is not made
• The case for a single site is not made
• The proposal is contrary to local, regional and national/EU policies
• There will be significant adverse climate change impacts
• The proposal will not maximise energy recovery from waste
• There has been no proper public consultation
• There will be adverse impacts on protected wildlife species
• There will be significant traffic impacts, notably on the A59/A168
• Cumulative impacts of this proposal alongside other similar proposals for the area are not assessed

It would be preferable to use your own words and choose one or two issues about which you feel strongly.

So – object online or in writing.

Call for a public inquiry

The issues that are raised by this incinerator are far wider than will be considered in the normal planning process. The facts that it will affect more than one authority area and will impact on council policy for decades, coupled with the enormous expense and controversy of the scheme mean that it should be examined at a public inquiry.

We are urging people to write to Eric Pickles asking him to call in the application for a public inquiry – you can download a model letter calling for a Public Inquiry (in MS Word format). Don’t forget to send a copy to your local MP.

Whilst the North Yorkshire planning department will doubtlessly rubberstamp the plans (the Councillors on the committe have, after all, already voted in favour of the plans), a refusal at public inquiry is possibly the only thing that might make the Councils think again. Planning inquiries into incinerators have been lost all over the country. This is a winnable battle. For the sake ofour carbon emissions, living sustainably and not wasting enormous amounts of taxpayers money, we have to win it.

And just to underline how winnable the public inquiry is, yet another incinerator has been cancelled, this time in Merthyr Tydfil. Read the story on the Friends of the Earth site.

Some things you may like to mention when calling for an inquiry:

• No proper public consultation has been carried out
  The only consultation held, in December 2005, asked residents to choose their preference from two options, both of which included incineration. It was subsequently acknowledged that the consultation had not been carried out correctly and would be re-run. This has not happened.
• North Yorkshire has no adopted Waste Framework
  North Yorkshire’s Waste and Minerals Framework was thrown out by a government inspector in 2008. North Yorkshire has not yet completed work on a new Waste and Minerals Framework, having only just completed the first of several rounds of consultation. The application is therefore premature.
• The proposals are based on outdated information
  The Joint Municipal Waste Strategy behind this proposed facility was drawn up between 2002 and 2006. It has been overtaken by events. Waste volumes have now been on a downward trend for several years, and recycling rates are already approaching the 2020 target, so that the anticipated tonnage of residual waste (320,000 tonnes per year) will not be available unless recycling is scaled back. This would contravene PPS10, which says that waste facilities should not prejudice movement up the waste hierarchy.

We’ll post more here as we chew through the enormous pile of documents lodged with the planning application.

The incinerator was part of a waste contract (PFI, inevitably) drawn up between Cornwall County Council and SITA UK in 2006. It would burn 240,000 tonnes of rubbish each year.

Council had originally refused the application, by SITA UK, by a vote of twenty to one in March 2009. Controversy then erupted when the Council Leader  was caught lobbying the Secretary of State (Mr Pickles again) to grant the appeal and allow the incinerator to be built. This after Cllr Alec Robertson had attended public meetings, assuring voters that the Council would robustly defend its refusal.

What changed? An election. The Conservatives took over the running of Cornwall County Council in June 2009. Despite having publicly voted against the plan when in opposition, the Conservative group now appeared desperate for it to go through. The Council stood to lose too much money, and the Tories found themselves responsible (in the loosest sense of the word).

Eric Pickles, it seems, responded to the pleas of impending poverty from his fellow Tories, and granted the appeal. The campaigners then went to the High Court, where Mr Justice Collins announced his decision: the Secretary of State had not acted properly in allowing the appeal. The application should not go ahead.

Specifically, he had failed to take into account a requirement of the EU Habitats Directive to assess the impacts on special areas of conservation at Breney Common and Goss and Tregoss Moors.

It may seem like bureaucratic pedantry but it illustrates how these things tend to work: had Pickles not wanted the scheme to go ahead, a directive, regulation or precedent could have been found to justify stopping it – here was one that would have done the job. Indeed, campaigners had presented the evidence of the missing habitat impact assessment at the appeal. But Pickles almost certainly did want the scheme to go ahead – the evidence was ignored and the application given the nod. So the campaigners were forced to trek on to the High Court with the same evidence, where it was taken notice of.

Had they not done so, the incinerator would have gone ahead: a Council or Government can often rely on simply outspending campaigners in a legal battle.

The moral of the story? Incinerators are not a safe bet. The fact that the Council has an enormous amount of money riding on a waste strategy does not make it any more likely that they will get a planning application through. The better idea is to have a good strategy with public support to start with. Councils all over the UK are learning this the hard way – we can add Cornwall to the roll call: Derby, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, East Lothian, Staffordshire…

And an incinerator agreed by the Lib Dems before losing power? Sounds familiar.

The application is currently going through basic checking, so it is not yet possible to send objections.

However it is vital that we get this application examined at public inquiry. Only the Planning Inspectorate has the objectivity to give this application a fair hearing. A Planning Inspector can question the need for a development, including such factors as the predicted recycling rates. This happened in the case of the Sinfin Lane incinerator in Derby, where the inspector found that the 70% targets being suggested by campaigners were unjustly ruled out.

Information on how to object will be on this site as soon as the application is accepted by the Council. Keep checking back here. See also the press release from our sister group, NYWAG.

In other news, the Council’s grand launch for Zero Waste York appears to have been scaled back to a “Sustainable Food Day”, perhaps indicating that the ‘new broom’ Labour administration may not be as committed to the idea after all.

When we started talking about adopting a ‘zero waste’ strategy, waste strategy officers said we were naive and that zero waste was impractical (despite the Lib Dems putting in in the manifesto on which they took control of the Council). Waste would continue to grow.

Now we all seem to be on the path to zero waste – but even so, York’s administration is not going to look again at the incinerator proposal.

The elections saw incinerator convert and NIMBY Councillor Steve Galloway lose the seat he has held for almost four decades, along with his protege, the Council Leader Andrew Waller. Galloway was in charge when the discussions kicked off, and handed over to Waller . Labour used the broken pledge on incinerators as part of their campaigning.

The new administration has just released its rebranded ‘Your Voice’ newsletter (it was previously ‘Your City’), with a supplement dedicated to recycling and waste reduction (read it here – PDF). Under the heading “Zero Waste York” it gives away precious little detail about what the Council might be planning to do, aside from announcing a big ‘Zero Waste York Launch day’ in September. It cites a dedicated ‘Zero Waste York’ page on the Council website, which gives the date of the launch day as September 23rd. And it also announces that Zero Waste York is on Twitter @ZeroWasteYork – but so far that’s not giving much away either.

The problem is still there, though: if we get anywhere near zero waste, as the UK government wants us to, what do we send to burn? And why bother?