Edmonton EcoPark: Proposed Expansion

Alan Whitehead Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Westminster Hall

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

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Wood Green—

[Catherine West]

Woodford Green.

[Dr Whitehead]

Sorry, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). My office companion is my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West), so that is on my mind all the time, as it should be. I need to get my nomenclature absolutely straight.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green on having secured today’s debate. The debate appears to be about a specific incinerator in a specific place with specific proposals for its extension, but it encapsulates much wider questions: how do we deal with our waste in modern times, and what are the best ways of dealing with it and, indeed, the energy that might come from it? By examining those wider questions, we loop back to the best thing to do with the North London Waste Authority, and the Edmonton incinerator in particular.

The first thing that is important in addressing this modern debate is to recognise—as my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) has correctly pointed out—that although we have been talking about waste this afternoon, we should not be talking about it in this way, because the vast majority of waste is actually a resource. In the context of the modern circular economy, the idea that we place a material that we have used into a stream, and then it is gone out of the system one way or another—it used to be buried; now it is incinerated—is clearly not appropriate if we regard that waste primarily as a resource. The duty of authorities dealing with waste should be to make sure that as much of that resource as possible can be recovered for use elsewhere, one way or another.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my hon. Friend for what he is saying. Does he not think we should be recording the level of composting, as well as recycling? Sadly, a huge amount of food waste and green waste probably ends up in incineration or landfill when it could be efficiently composted and provide compost for local people.

[Dr Whitehead]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right: that is one of the elements of regarding waste as a resource, because waste—particularly municipal waste—will have a number of elements in it. It will have putrescibles in it, it will have waste from household activities, it may well have wood waste and metal waste and it will certainly have plastic waste. All those types of waste can be reused, recovered and dealt with in different ways. The very last thing that we should do with such products—what we should do only when nothing else can be done with them—is to burn them, even if we think we are recovering energy.

In 1971, when the Edmonton incinerator first came into production, the convention was that we took the rubbish from the bins, put it in a truck, took it smartly down to the local tip and buried it in landfill. That was it. For a long time, we were the worst country in Europe for landfilling our waste. In recent years, that has turned around but, unfortunately, only into the next stage up on the waste hierarchy, which is to incinerate, rather than to bury in the ground. Both the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green and my right hon. Friend the Member for Islington North mentioned in their excellent contributions that we have come a long way since that sort of analysis—not just whether we should move waste up the hierarchy more efficiently than we used to, but what is available to work with once we decide what we want to do.

I appreciate that the task for a waste authority, such as the North London Waste Authority, is difficult. It has huge amounts of waste coming in every day, it has to do something with it, the task never ends and, in recent years, the Government have not helped, providing little support for innovative and novel ways of dealing with waste, separating resources out and so on. A little while ago, for example, the Government pulled a number of PFI—private finance initiative—plants that local authorities had in the pipeline for waste. Authorities are pretty much left to their own devices to bring forward innovation.

A waste authority under such pressure might well think, “This is a real problem. Here’s the easiest way to solve it without putting it into landfill.” That seems to be what has happened with the Edmonton incinerator. Not only have we had a large incinerator there for a number of years, but plans are now in place to extend it, which would make the past even more nailed down in the future, with that future being incineration. Believe me—this has happened across the country, including in my own county—once a contract for a large-scale incineration facility such as that is entered into, it is with us for a long time. It freezes the technology in time, at that particular point.

As the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green mentioned, however, that means that, as we begin to go up through the waste hierarchy, we start by taking further fractions out of the waste. It becomes a beast that is more and more hungry to be fed, because of the contracts for the incineration plants. So, waste is pulled in from a wider and wider area and, in the end, it can start to impede efforts to move up the waste hierarchy with all that waste.

Those concerns are over and above the one expressed by hon. Members this afternoon about what comes out of the chimney stack from incineration. We have learnt a lot more these days, than we had in the early ’70s when the arrangements first came into place. Although techniques for dampening emissions such as nitrous oxide, particulates and various other things that come out of the chimney stack have improved, that is still a very real issue, as hon. Members have mentioned, for the health of the neighbourhoods around incineration plants and, indeed, a wider area, as we have seen from studies that have taken place on the subject.

We have a proposal, which I have described on other occasions as a throwback. It tries to take technology from two decades ago into the next decade and land us with it for a long time to come. It should not happen.

There are several other ways, both emerging and in quite widespread practice, of dealing with those waste streams, particularly through fractionalising them out. Another small matter to put at the Government’s door: we still do not have sufficient plastics recycling and reprocessing facilities in this country. We are still in the business, possibly for a long time to come, of exporting plastics waste. We need Government action to make sure that those plastics recycling plants are available so that waste authorities can ensure that their plastics collection is properly dealt with afterwards.

We also know that there are techniques available to gasify waste in general and produce syngas and dimethyl ether for use in vehicles and various other plants. It is a renewable form of gas that could be useful for the future of heating, which is very topical. Those techniques do not produce the sort of emissions that arise from incineration plants. They can deal with massive amounts of waste. Indeed, anaerobic digestion, which is a rather grand way of talking about composting—

[Jeremy Corbyn]

It is more or less the same thing.

[Dr Whitehead]

Indeed. It is more or less the same thing.

[Stewart Hosie (in the Chair)]

Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is coming close to the end of his remarks. I want to leave time for the Minister.

[Dr Whitehead]

Indeed, Mr Hosie, I am approaching the end of my remarks and I am guided by your instruction.

There are modern techniques that can deal with waste. My first plea to the North London Waste Authority is to think about those new techniques in a positive way and not simply decide to take the same old tried and tested routes. There are so much better ways of doing it. My second plea is that, if the North London Waste Authority decides to have a review of the matter, the Government will support that. I know that the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green has written on several occasions to request the Government’s support for some of the new measures that can deal with waste and resource in a different way.

We have the low carbon future to think about. We have got to get waste and resource management techniques in place that address that, either through carbon capture and storage or new methods of collection and dealing with waste. I am certain that the current proposal, should it go ahead, will not stand the test of the future. We should have our eyes on that future and together make sure that the waste arrangements for north-west London are fit for it rather than harking back to the past.