Edmonton EcoPark: Proposed Expansion

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 9th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to be in this debate with you chairing it, Mr Hosie. I thank the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) for the energy he has put into obtaining this debate. I also thank the cross-party group that has supported him.

It is essential that we think seriously about where we are going with our environment and our natural world. They are subject to debate all the time, and we have just had COP26. We have to challenge the conventional orthodoxy about waste disposal—that, somehow or other, incineration is a good thing. If we do not, we will continue to damage the lungs of our children and our communities with not just particles but nanoparticles that are very invasive of the human body. The excellent “Pollution from waste incineration” report from the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution, chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), describes that issue very well.

I want to say a big thank you to all the local campaigners —those around the incinerator in Edmonton, who my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) represents so well, as well as the people from all over the seven boroughs that make up the North London Waste Authority.

Before I became an MP, I was a councillor in Haringey. I remember well the discussions about developing the incinerator and cross-borough co-operation to get rid of rubbish. Back in the day—we are talking 40-plus years ago—it was seen as an environmental step forward to burn waste in order to generate electricity, rather than to put it into landfill. It was seen as a good thing to do. I do not think many of us on the council in those days thought very much about what would happen beyond that. Incineration saved landfill and was a way of getting rid of waste. It was lamentable. We should not have done it; I know that. Lots of things should not have been done. But now we have a great opportunity to change the dial on whether we go for further incineration or really put pressure on all of us, local authorities included, to develop a much more effective and comprehensive system for recycling our waste. The technology of the 1970s is not appropriate for the 21st century, and we need to move on from it.

The health effects I have mentioned. The emission effects I have mentioned. But as the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said, who actually suffers as a result of the pollution that comes from incineration? I get that the plant now being considered for development at the Edmonton site is a lot better than the one there now. I get that there are filters and all that. I fully understand all of that. The fundamental problem is that we are piling a lot of waste, including plastic, into an incinerator; it burns and gives off emissions that are gas, which clearly cannot be picked up by a filter, and the nanoparticles, which I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, are very invasive of the human body and particularly damaging to children in schools, out in the streets or playing. We are polluting the next generation.

The opposition around the country to incineration is enormous. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West will be speaking in a few moments. People defeated the idea of an incinerator in Swansea. There is a huge campaign going on now against a proposed incinerator in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and there are many other such campaigns around the country. Why? Because people do not want to be polluted, but also because they recognise that it is simply the wrong direction to take and is outwith everything that was agreed at COP26.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

The truth is also that there are now so many new technologies, which others are using, that mean that incineration is no longer necessary. There are other, cleaner ways to get rid of waste.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I absolutely concur. If we look at the processes of waste disposal—perhaps we not talk about waste disposal but about recycling as the priority—that are happening in Germany and Scandinavia, we see that they are far in advance of so much of what we are doing in this country. We could do so much more and do it so much better.

The North London Waste Authority area—the seven boroughs—produces about 820,000 tonnes of waste per annum. Much of that goes into the incinerator. Across the whole area, only 30% is recycled. The recycling rates are abysmal, quite frankly. They are abysmal in many other parts of the country as well. Germany recycles 65%. Other countries achieve that. We are nowhere near.

I remember being appointed as chair of Agenda 21 by Islington Council—this was as the local MP—to try to increase recycling rates. We managed to double the rate, up to 30%, after about 10 years of very hard work, including by my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) when she was leader of the council. I just felt so disappointed that we could not get so much further. I get it: this is complicated; it is difficult. The collection systems are complicated. But if we want to give our children clean air, if we want to fulfil the obligations that we have signed up to at COP26, we should not be investing more than £1 billion in an incinerator that the CEO of the company says is over capacity anyway. We should instead be looking to a reduction in incineration over 10 years; we should go from where we are now down to somewhere nearer to zero in 10 years’ time. That would certainly concentrate the mind and help us to bring about much higher rates of recycling.

On the decision that has been taken by the North London Waste Authority, I have heard the financial arguments that it has put. I have been asked, “Well, what’s your alternative if you’re opposed to this?” It has been quite a robust debate. I am not accusing the North London Waste Authority members of being anti-environment. They are not. In their individual boroughs, they have done a fantastic job in improving the environment and recycling rates. But we have to go a lot further and a lot faster, and that is why I want to make the case, and support the case that has been made today by others, for some kind of intervention by the Government to prevent this thing from going ahead and to prevent the expenditure of this huge amount of money through “green” bonds—yes, “green” bonds to pay for an incinerator that is, I think, not needed and not necessary.

I will finish with this point. I have had a long discussion with a number of people, who have spent an awful lot of time and are much more knowledgeable on all of this than probably any of us in this Chamber today, about how we can reduce incineration. They point out all the technology that is now available that was not in the past: the separation of metals, paper and glass, and the reduction in plastics. That has to be accompanied by a much tougher campaign on packaging, waste and plastic production. What we will end up with is a massive incinerator without enough rubbish to fill it from the neighbourhood area. We will import rubbish from other parts of London, or from abroad, to burn in that incinerator, because we are locked into a £1 billion contract to build it. Can we pause for a moment, think of what we are doing and the opportunity we now have to turn the corner from incineration to reuse and recycling? That is surely the legacy we want to leave to all our children.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.