"It is utterly unsustainable" said one Northwich Town Councillor we spoke to.
Our group are deeply concerned by the construction of and the applications to enlarge
the incinerator which is in the initial stages of build on Griffiths Road in Lostock.
Our group are deeply concerned by the construction of and the applications to enlarge
the incinerator which is in the initial stages of build on Griffiths Road in Lostock.
In Sept 2021, our members spoke to town councilors to better understand the current plans:
(The information here is correct to the best of our knowledge. We welcome any corrections or updates)
There will be two separate incinerators on the site:
There is a bio-digester on this site already:
Started as a pilot, and now permanent on the same site, there is the Ørsted Renescience plant, taking black bin waste, but this uses enzymes to extract gas from the organic matter, leaving clean metal & plastics to be recycled, and organic material to be used as a soil conditioner. We think this plant is run by Organic Waste Management Ltd and may accept food waste too.
Current waste management
Cheshire West and Chester generates ~70,000 tonnes of residual household waste every year, equal to 2.9% of the projected incineration capacity (2,400,000 tonnes). But all Northwich's waste goes to Runcorn as CWAC have contract with Viridor there.
Do we need more incinerators in the UK?
This country already has more than enough incineration capacity to incinerate all of the non-recyclable waste we generate and building incinerators will lead to low recycling rates in areas of high incineration i.e. they are incinerating large amounts of recyclable material. Councils often have quotas to fill and are punished if they don't provide the incinerator with enough waste (they call it fuel) to keep the Energy from Waste part of the plant spinning. 50 new incinerators are planned by 2030, which will double the current capacity and create an extra 10 million tonnes of CO2 per year. These companies are preventing a transition to a circular economy and local authorities are just going along with whatever is cheapest i.e. incineration.
If Northwich town and county council objected, who gave permission?
In 2012, Ed Davey MP granted the Sustainable Energy Plant (LSEP) (now under construction) planning permission on appeal
Greg Clark MP approved the increase in capacity from 60MWe - 90MWe for the LSEP site, over riding CWAC and NTC objections
It’s a central GOV decision (Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). Minister in charge at BEIS is Kwasi Kwarteng.
Council engagement:
NTC have not received paper work to contest this latest development
We have heard that some of the plans appear to have been 'lost'.
It's going to be bigger than first planned:
Now, LSEP wants to increase the amount of waste handled by more than 20 per cent to 728,000 tonnes per year.
In Februray 2021, LSEP Ltd's survey allowed residents to comment on the plans to increase the amount of waste burned at the site from 600,000 to 728,000 tonnes a year.
That is expected to lead to an increase from 276 to 434 vehicle movements a day – between 7am and 11pm – to and from the plant, which is due to open in 2023. According to the LSEP spokesperson these vehicle movements include Refuse Collection Vehicles. The implication of this is instead of kerb-side collections being shredded and sorted to extract metal (as is currently done), it seems bin lorries will drive straight from street collection to plant.
There will be a lorry going in every 6minutes! (a member of the town council thinks it may be even more frequent).
£40million already spent on site - total cost of project will be £400 million
What about the pollution / health risks?
Incineration is currently excluded from the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, a scheme that puts a price on carbon emitted and sets a cap on total industrial carbon emissions (the government will reduce the cap over time to get to net-zero). This means incinerators have no current incentive to capture the carbon and can basically just ignore the issue... Since Brexit - they no-longer measure the CO2 emissions coming out of the chimneys, so these will not be included in the UK’s carbon emissions total.
Pollutant emissions are only measured at ‘peak burn’ when they are least.
They are highest as the plant warms up and cools.
At an incinerator in Croydon, toxic waste was burning for 9 hours, causing breathing difficulties to people living in the surrounding area. The toxins include dioxins, heavy metals and particles which are well-known to cause respiratory diseases, cancer, immune system damage and reproductive and developmental problems
Current Air monitoring in Northwich:
One commentator on our FB said: "There is no real-time air monitoring in Northwich - closest to us is Frodsham. We are relying on diffusion tubes which get checked once a year! I’ve asked CWAC to install one before this beast is built but they say because they haven’t been ordered to monitor the air and it’s expensive to do it, they just won’t be doing it!"
Did people in Northwich object?
A councillor has told us that he thinks 'most residents are in the dark about this'
A group called CHAIN have objected since the first plans in 2003 but are now quiet.
Chain made a short film: Wastetown
"Even after nine years campaigning against the TATA (previously Brunner Mond) Northwich waste incinerator their informal polling shows that the majority of residents know very little about it or the disastrous impact it will have on the town. This ignorance, in our view, is mainly due to the efforts by TATA, CWAC Council, local estate agents and developers to keep it as secret as possible combined with naïve denial by some people that something so awful and damaging would be allowed to happen". (Chain website)
Incinerator Policy elsewhere:
Wales has banned incinerators over 10mwatts. Ours will 90mwatts
Denmark has banned incinerators yet it’s Danish pension funds that are paying for this. The fund is called CI III (https://cipartners.dk/investments/investments-in-ci-iii/)
What are Transition doing?
MP engagement this month:
One of our group has written to Esther McVey about the incinerator. Response received.
We have also written to Mike Amesbury about the incinerator. Awaiting response.
We are discussing action with local residents - please contact us if you would like to attend our meetings.
Questions we still need answered:
Other incinerators in the UK:
Incinerators are symptomatic of Environmental racism and social injustice as they are most often built in areas of deprivation
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000xv7q?fbclid=IwAR3AS6lUN4YKB7T8gvObaSxkfMdGSYVgxDaqDyJLm34nHk2Do7t7DaFGlc4
Other ways that waste is potentially being 'resused'
We have recently heard that Essar Oil are planning to build a plant at bio-refinery at Stanlow to convert hundreds of 1000s of tons of unrecyclable waste to aviation fuel. The question remain where is all this waste for Northwich incineration and Stanlow aviation fuel going to come from? It will have to be importe d to Cheshire from somewhere. A lot of it will be made from fossil fuels and it will provide an incentive to create waste. It looks like Cheshire is set to become a big importer of waste!!
Essar said it takes 1.3 tonnes of waste per passenger to fly to Hong Kong from Manchester so that makes 2.6 tonnes per passenger per return journ, for a planeful of 450 passengers flying to Hong Hong and back from Manchester this would be 2.6 x 450 tonnes of waste i.e. 1170 tonnes of waste.
The CWAC website says that at present we dispose of 69,000 tonnes of waste but that 74% of this could be recycled which leaves 26% unrecyclable waste i.e. 17,940 tonnes which could be used for aviation fuel.
This would be enough to fuel 17,940/1,170 return journeys to Hong Kong, that is 15 journeys.
In other words the unrecyclable waste in Cheshire West could only fuel 15 return plane journeys to Hong Kong per year.
Essar’s website says that the plant will convert several hundred thousand tonnes of pre-processed waste to fuel.
Do we know where this fuel will come from and how it will get to Stanlow?
(The information here is correct to the best of our knowledge. We welcome any corrections or updates)
There will be two separate incinerators on the site:
- LSEP being built Plans
- Organic Waste Management Ltd (OWM) given planning permission 2 years ago for a 200,000 tonne incinerator a change to the original plan which was bio-digestion.
There is a bio-digester on this site already:
Started as a pilot, and now permanent on the same site, there is the Ørsted Renescience plant, taking black bin waste, but this uses enzymes to extract gas from the organic matter, leaving clean metal & plastics to be recycled, and organic material to be used as a soil conditioner. We think this plant is run by Organic Waste Management Ltd and may accept food waste too.
Current waste management
Cheshire West and Chester generates ~70,000 tonnes of residual household waste every year, equal to 2.9% of the projected incineration capacity (2,400,000 tonnes). But all Northwich's waste goes to Runcorn as CWAC have contract with Viridor there.
Do we need more incinerators in the UK?
This country already has more than enough incineration capacity to incinerate all of the non-recyclable waste we generate and building incinerators will lead to low recycling rates in areas of high incineration i.e. they are incinerating large amounts of recyclable material. Councils often have quotas to fill and are punished if they don't provide the incinerator with enough waste (they call it fuel) to keep the Energy from Waste part of the plant spinning. 50 new incinerators are planned by 2030, which will double the current capacity and create an extra 10 million tonnes of CO2 per year. These companies are preventing a transition to a circular economy and local authorities are just going along with whatever is cheapest i.e. incineration.
If Northwich town and county council objected, who gave permission?
In 2012, Ed Davey MP granted the Sustainable Energy Plant (LSEP) (now under construction) planning permission on appeal
Greg Clark MP approved the increase in capacity from 60MWe - 90MWe for the LSEP site, over riding CWAC and NTC objections
It’s a central GOV decision (Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy). Minister in charge at BEIS is Kwasi Kwarteng.
Council engagement:
NTC have not received paper work to contest this latest development
We have heard that some of the plans appear to have been 'lost'.
It's going to be bigger than first planned:
Now, LSEP wants to increase the amount of waste handled by more than 20 per cent to 728,000 tonnes per year.
In Februray 2021, LSEP Ltd's survey allowed residents to comment on the plans to increase the amount of waste burned at the site from 600,000 to 728,000 tonnes a year.
That is expected to lead to an increase from 276 to 434 vehicle movements a day – between 7am and 11pm – to and from the plant, which is due to open in 2023. According to the LSEP spokesperson these vehicle movements include Refuse Collection Vehicles. The implication of this is instead of kerb-side collections being shredded and sorted to extract metal (as is currently done), it seems bin lorries will drive straight from street collection to plant.
There will be a lorry going in every 6minutes! (a member of the town council thinks it may be even more frequent).
£40million already spent on site - total cost of project will be £400 million
What about the pollution / health risks?
Incineration is currently excluded from the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, a scheme that puts a price on carbon emitted and sets a cap on total industrial carbon emissions (the government will reduce the cap over time to get to net-zero). This means incinerators have no current incentive to capture the carbon and can basically just ignore the issue... Since Brexit - they no-longer measure the CO2 emissions coming out of the chimneys, so these will not be included in the UK’s carbon emissions total.
Pollutant emissions are only measured at ‘peak burn’ when they are least.
They are highest as the plant warms up and cools.
At an incinerator in Croydon, toxic waste was burning for 9 hours, causing breathing difficulties to people living in the surrounding area. The toxins include dioxins, heavy metals and particles which are well-known to cause respiratory diseases, cancer, immune system damage and reproductive and developmental problems
Current Air monitoring in Northwich:
One commentator on our FB said: "There is no real-time air monitoring in Northwich - closest to us is Frodsham. We are relying on diffusion tubes which get checked once a year! I’ve asked CWAC to install one before this beast is built but they say because they haven’t been ordered to monitor the air and it’s expensive to do it, they just won’t be doing it!"
Did people in Northwich object?
A councillor has told us that he thinks 'most residents are in the dark about this'
A group called CHAIN have objected since the first plans in 2003 but are now quiet.
- https://www.anti-incinerator.org.uk/proposed-sites/northwich/northwich-public-inquiry/
- http://www.anti-incinerator.org.uk/tata-attack-northwich-once-again-and-emissions-could-be-the-killer/?fbclid=IwAR1oLBgenMKYWwOo9pI4FSDT-yHf4eflABwE1-U-NrbRMZHP58RYZYNle0
Chain made a short film: Wastetown
"Even after nine years campaigning against the TATA (previously Brunner Mond) Northwich waste incinerator their informal polling shows that the majority of residents know very little about it or the disastrous impact it will have on the town. This ignorance, in our view, is mainly due to the efforts by TATA, CWAC Council, local estate agents and developers to keep it as secret as possible combined with naïve denial by some people that something so awful and damaging would be allowed to happen". (Chain website)
Incinerator Policy elsewhere:
Wales has banned incinerators over 10mwatts. Ours will 90mwatts
Denmark has banned incinerators yet it’s Danish pension funds that are paying for this. The fund is called CI III (https://cipartners.dk/investments/investments-in-ci-iii/)
What are Transition doing?
MP engagement this month:
One of our group has written to Esther McVey about the incinerator. Response received.
We have also written to Mike Amesbury about the incinerator. Awaiting response.
We are discussing action with local residents - please contact us if you would like to attend our meetings.
Questions we still need answered:
- How far is waste going to travel to get here?
- How will our council monitor air pollution changes and what powers do they have to close the plant if they appear dangerous?
- How can a Danish financer justifiably invest in an industry that is outlawed in its home country?
Other incinerators in the UK:
- Dorset (Portland) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFW0tiYW6Fw
- Edmonton: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/31/edmonton-incinerator-expansion-fundamentally-unjust-say-residents
- Croydon: where the Viridor incinerator is exceeding national limits of carbon monoxide emissions by 200%! https://insidecroydon.com/2019/08/29/viridor-incinerator-under-investigation-by-environment-agency/?fbclid=IwAR1vLaj3nn71ufmK_POUKa6CjuPG37Siccv9H1r7aFEmuX7DaP4iIjJHmK0
Incinerators are symptomatic of Environmental racism and social injustice as they are most often built in areas of deprivation
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000xv7q?fbclid=IwAR3AS6lUN4YKB7T8gvObaSxkfMdGSYVgxDaqDyJLm34nHk2Do7t7DaFGlc4
Other ways that waste is potentially being 'resused'
We have recently heard that Essar Oil are planning to build a plant at bio-refinery at Stanlow to convert hundreds of 1000s of tons of unrecyclable waste to aviation fuel. The question remain where is all this waste for Northwich incineration and Stanlow aviation fuel going to come from? It will have to be importe d to Cheshire from somewhere. A lot of it will be made from fossil fuels and it will provide an incentive to create waste. It looks like Cheshire is set to become a big importer of waste!!
Essar said it takes 1.3 tonnes of waste per passenger to fly to Hong Kong from Manchester so that makes 2.6 tonnes per passenger per return journ, for a planeful of 450 passengers flying to Hong Hong and back from Manchester this would be 2.6 x 450 tonnes of waste i.e. 1170 tonnes of waste.
The CWAC website says that at present we dispose of 69,000 tonnes of waste but that 74% of this could be recycled which leaves 26% unrecyclable waste i.e. 17,940 tonnes which could be used for aviation fuel.
This would be enough to fuel 17,940/1,170 return journeys to Hong Kong, that is 15 journeys.
In other words the unrecyclable waste in Cheshire West could only fuel 15 return plane journeys to Hong Kong per year.
Essar’s website says that the plant will convert several hundred thousand tonnes of pre-processed waste to fuel.
Do we know where this fuel will come from and how it will get to Stanlow?