Waste Incinerators

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I congratulate the hon. Member for Derby South (Baggy Shanker) on securing this debate.

Waste management is a huge issue, which requires the attention of us all in this House. We Liberal Democrats are committed to strengthening incentives to reduce waste and our country’s reliance on incinerators. Although incineration of residual waste might be the least bad option available at the moment to handle our unrecycled and unseparated waste, it is far from the long-term solution that we need. Let us be absolutely clear: incinerators are currently an unavoidable solution for many local councils. They are a deeply imperfect solution to a much bigger problem, though. When we get to the point where all of our commercial and domestic waste is avoided, reduced, reused, recycled and composted with no residual waste remaining, I will be at the front of the march to shut down our energy-from-waste facilities, for they will have served their purpose.

As several Members have correctly observed, incineration sits at the very bottom of the waste hierarchy. The energy that incinerators produce for local heat networks will ideally have been switched to air source and ground source heat pumps or perhaps waste heat from server farms, leaving these towering structures finally silent, but we are a long way from that point. Today, well-managed and well-maintained incinerators are an effective and safe method for disposing of our residual waste.

[Ben Obese-Jecty]

Can the hon. Gentleman clarify whether the parliamentary position of the Liberal Democrats is pro-incinerator? Can he tell me how many incinerators there are in Liberal Democrat constituencies?

[Luke Taylor]

I am happy to clarify. Incineration and ERFs are the least worst available option for disposing of our residual waste. The hon. Gentleman referred earlier to the ping-pong in approaches to incineration between different Administrations and different political parties. On his question about where the incinerators are, well, my constituency, Sutton and Cheam, is next to Carshalton and Wallington. Our borough, Sutton, has an incinerator in Beddington. It was initially given planning permission by the local council because of legal advice, but it was called in by a fella called Boris Johnson, and what political party did he represent? He was the Conservative Mayor of London, and he reviewed the plans and approved the incinerator in Sutton. We have an incinerator operating in our constituency because it was approved by a Conservative London Mayor.

In his 2022 report, chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty wrote:

“The ERF is preferred over the use of landfill due to the opportunity to recover valuable and sustainable power.”

But they are not all well maintained and not all well managed. We know that we must move beyond them as soon as possible, but we can do that only by speeding up the changes in the ecosystem of waste management in this country that would enable their extinction.

Let us begin with plastic and packaging. We support the strengthening of incentives to reduce packaging and waste sent to landfill and incineration. In the coalition Government, we pioneered the plastic bag levy, which was exactly the kind of successful societal change that we need. It is almost impossible to remember a time when we were not charged for a plastic bag or did not give a second thought to our need to take one.

The reuse of bags and the growing market for stronger reusable bags is fully normalised—we do not bat an eyelid. It is akin to the removal of lead from petrol. Something that once seemed pervasive and impossible to imagine an alternative for was phased out entirely in such a way that whole generations have no recollection of it ever being any other way. That did not happen overnight. It took a mission-driven Government to step in and lead the way, incentivising the right kind of behaviour in waste management to light a path forward for society to take. I accept that that is already happening in some areas, but we need to go further and faster.

To meaningfully tackle plastic pollution and waste and get Britain as close as possible to full recycling, we have called for a deposit return scheme for food and drink bottles and containers, working with the devolved Administrations to ensure consistency across the UK. We must learn lessons from the difficulties with the Scottish scheme.

To further reduce residual waste, we have been calling on the Government to expedite the complete elimination of non-recyclable single-use plastics within three years and their replacement with affordable, reusable, recyclable or compostable alternatives. That would enable us to set an ambition of ending all plastic waste exports by 2030. The separation of plastic waste for reprocessing is critical to reduce the amount of recyclable plastic that is unnecessarily burned in incinerators. We know that peer group pressure and normalisation of behaviour is critical to that.

The comments made by the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) remind me of the former leader of the Sutton Conservatives, who told residents recently that

“most of your recycling goes up the chimney”

at the local ERF—untrue claims that undermine efforts to increase recycling. If there are efforts to improve recycling and our diversion of plastics from incineration, perhaps he can remind his colleagues of the importance of recycling as often as they possibly can.

Turning to food waste, in this age of food banks, according to the company Waste Managed, the UK throws away 9.5 million tonnes of food every year. That is nearly 24 million loaves of bread. In Sutton borough in my constituency, we recently had a campaign to improve the participation in the recycling of food waste that targeted about 15,000 households. That campaign saw an increase of 17% by tonnage of food waste recycling in the areas targeted and a 10% increase in the number of households participating in the programme. The evidence is clear: targeted programmes can be effective at improving participation rates and getting food waste down.

The previous Conservative Government failed to take the measures needed to support businesses in becoming more efficient and to support communities in moving beyond the throwaway culture. Many private sector enterprises, such as Too Good To Go, are opening up in this space and, frankly, doing a far better job than the Government. That is welcome, but a reminder that there is room for the Government to take steps of their own.

The Government have to look again at the enormous mistake that is their family farms tax, which will undermine any last vestiges of localism in the food chain that remain in this country. If we do not incentivise local produce being sold to local people through local businesses, we stand no chance of getting our emissions down, minimising food waste, encouraging healthier eating or moving beyond incineration.

On air pollution, let us be clear that we do not have to accept that the way incinerators currently operate is the only way in this final phase of their history. A significant amount of the concern around the use and potential misuse of incineration stems from mismanagement and the fact that our regulator, the Environment Agency, is prevented from doing the pervasive monitoring that it should be able to.

In my borough of Sutton, the Beddington ERF, on occasion, exceeds the pollution levels set out in its facilities permit. Although those breaches are minor and often for a very short period, and are often caused by nitrous oxide canisters getting into the waste stream, they are not investigated very often by the Environment Agency. The local council and waste authority lack the powers to compel the operator to address problems in their sorting and filtration systems. We can move towards the managed extinction of this form of waste management and wean ourselves off incineration altogether only if we make sure that existing sites are properly managed and meaningfully regulated.

The Liberal Democrats want the UK to be world-leading in its efforts to improve air quality. We have called for a £20 billion emergency fund for local authorities to tackle the clean air crisis, and a £150 billion green recovery plan. We need to pass a new Clean Air Act based on World Health Organisation guidelines and enforced by a new air quality agency, to codify in law that nobody should be subject to consistently awful levels of air pollution. Not passing those measures makes a mockery of the Government’s already opaque plans for meaningful climate action. We were deeply concerned by the finding of the Climate Change Committee’s seventh carbon budget that the UK has deliverable plans for only a third of the emissions reductions needed to meet climate goals. If the Government want to rectify that then they should get a grip, with a beefed-up approach to managing waste and dealing with air pollution. We can do a lot more to prevent waste going to incineration in the first place, and better regulate the existing stock of incinerators.

The recent progress report of the Office for Environmental Protection noted that waste generation and incineration rates have continued to increase, but recycling rates have stalled. That is not the case in my borough of Sutton, where we have seen reductions in the tonnage of waste sent to the ERF from residents, but elsewhere more effort must be made. We need an active Government to step up to the plate and reverse that worrying trend. We must take meaningful action to regulate existing incinerators and look more closely at proposed new incinerators, such as at Canford Magna in the south-west of England, where data suggests that 95% of the required capacity already exists. We must implement a better food waste strategy, eradicate plastic waste and speed up the energy transition to alternative technologies that would hasten the end of residual waste. That would allow us to move away from incineration, and finally consign incinerators to the oblivion of history, to sit in engineering museums alongside Victorian technology as a reminder of how important waste reduction is, and how critical it is at the top of the waste hierarchy.