Waste Incineration Facilities

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Tuesday 11th February 2020 Westminster Hall

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) on securing the debate. As she said, it is our second debate on the matter in recent weeks, and it is one of a series of contributions from her on the question of waste incineration, particularly in relation to what she described as the “monster” incinerator that is planned for her area.

Other hon. Members used that phrase, as well as the words “giant” and “enormous”, today when they spoke about planned or active incinerators in their areas. As the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) said, we need to understand why, in an era of zero-carbon ambitions for our economy, the idea of granting permission for such enormous plants to deal with our waste is still being contemplated.

In general policy, we must recognise that the age of incinerators is over. A decade or two ago, perhaps we could have said that incineration was an improvement on the previous practice of landfill. Indeed, in this country incineration has increased in inverse proportion to the reduction in landfill over the last few years. However, as we move towards net zero, we are in danger of freezing in time our waste strategies by granting permission for large incinerators that capture waste streams over time. That will prevent us from moving up the waste hierarchy in dealing with our waste generally, and in looking at it as a resource to be recycled, reused and put back into the circular economy—rather than put in landfill or burned, usually for minimal energy recovery.

It is significant that only 16 of the country’s 44 incinerators are enabled for anything more than minimal energy recovery. They are enabled for combined heat and power, to capture the heat as well as the electricity that comes out of the process, but only half of them actually produce any heat and power. The vast majority of large incinerators do not produce much energy, and they certainly do not capture the heat that comes out of the plants.

On the other hand, they capture the waste stream over long periods of time. My hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones) described that process in his area, with waste arriving from all over the country to feed the furnaces of the incinerators. From the description of the plans for the new north London waste incinerator given by my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor), I suspect that is also the case in her area. We are in danger of ossifying the process of waste disposal. Now is not the time to go down that route; it is the time to move rapidly up the waste hierarchy and think about different ways of disposing of waste.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we are not here to blame local cash-strapped councils for going down that route? To recycle properly, councils need resources.

[Dr Whitehead]

The hon. Member read my mind. I was about to say that I do not want to blame local authorities for the actions that they have taken over a time when they have had no money to deal with the issue. They have merely had exhortations from central Government, and there have been no resources to go alongside the actions that they are required to undertake. There is a temptation to try to resolve the problems in a local area by going into partnership with a waste company. That may produce a solution to the local waste disposal problems, but it will do so at the cost of a 20, 30 or even 40-year contract that will fix the future policy of that local authority or consortium of local authorities.

It is imperative to recognise that to move up the waste hierarchy nationally, we need the resources to get away from incineration. There are further exhortations on the matter in the waste strategy. We cannot simply say that local authorities must have separate arrangements for collecting all the waste food in their area; we need to ensure that local authorities have the resources to enable them to move up the waste hierarchy without being subject to the temptation of using large incinerators to solve their problems.

We are at a turning point. The future is net zero; it cannot be incineration. We have to move rapidly up the waste hierarchy, and there are challenges and obstacles to that ambition. There will be some residual waste, but, as hon. Members have mentioned this morning, the current definition of residual waste encompasses things that it should not. For example, only 9% of plastic film is recycled. Most of it is incinerated or goes into landfill. Recently, I asked questions about 47 containers of plastic waste that were exported to Malaysia, and that the Malaysians did not want. They sent the waste back and said that it had been illegally exported to Malaysia.

[Jim Shannon]

When we recycle, we think that the waste will go wherever it should go. However, those containers of plastic that went to Malaysia and are now sitting there, waiting to be returned, show us that there needs to be accountability in the process. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to know where recyclable waste ends up?

[Dr Whitehead]

Absolutely. Part of moving up the waste hierarchy involves a proper and full accounting of what goes in and out at each stage of the process. I recently asked the Minister to assure me that the plastics that come back to the UK in those containers will be properly dealt with and will not just go into incineration or landfill. Other countries have started to bar us from using waste export as a route out of doing a proper job of recycling and moving up the waste hierarchy. We therefore need the next generation of resources to deal with that move up the waste hierarchy. We simply do not have enough plants in this country that can properly recycle all the different grades of plastic waste, and we do not have enough anaerobic digestion plants to deal with the putrescibles that will come out of the waste stream. The Government have a substantial responsibility to ensure that those facilities are available, so that we can move up the waste hierarchy as fast as we need to on our path towards a net zero economy.

I am sure that the Minister will have words to say on this, and I hope to hear from her plans to make real the Government’s rightful exhortations to move up the waste hierarchy. She will be delighted that, unlike last week, I will now cease my comments and give her plenty of time to tell us what the Government will do in the new era that we are moving into.