Council seeks ‘massive’ drop in burnt rubbish as campaigners repeat calls for ‘zero waste economy’

Hackney Council is preparing for a “massive leap” in emissions reduction as it seeks to reduce the amount of residents’ non-recyclable waste burnt at the Edmonton incinerator by 13 per cent.

That figure would be reached if the borough takes the decision, understood to be under discussion by top councillors today, to cut the number of bin collections at street-level properties to once every fortnight.

The plan saw the largest consultation response from Hackney residents ever with 10,700 replies, and would see a a 4,500-tonne annual drop in how much of Hackney’s waste goes to Edmonton.

At the same time, campaigners are fighting a replacement incinerator in Enfield which brought protesters onto the street earlier in the year.

A spokesperson for the Stop Edmonton Incinerator campaign said: “The decommissioning of the current incinerator provides a wonderful opportunity. We must move toward a low carbon, zero waste, circular economy. We can’t keep burning our rubbish like we’ve been doing for the last half-century.

“We should be investing in solutions fit for the 21st century. Rest assured that in 2030 no other councils in the UK will be looking at our system as a model.

“Most of us wouldn’t consider burning a single piece of plastic, but we allow our councils to run a plastic-fueled bonfire 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The incinerator literally never stops burning this fossil fuel.”

Campaigners went on to call for the new incinerator to be “put on pause”, and for an independent environmental and social impact assessment of the project to be conducted.

The Stop Edmonton Incinerator campaign has also called for cost-benefit analyses to be made for alternative strategies, including facilities for mixed waste sorting, plastics sorting and recycling, and biogas production, as well as “a full review of Mechanical Biological Treatment [MBT], a proven and widely used method that involves sorting of rubbish and has less of a carbon-output than incineration”.

Hackney Council eco chief Cllr Jon Burke has stressed that there is no financial incentive for the Town Hall to use the incinerator, but that Edmonton and its replacement represent “the best of a suboptimal set of options” for local authorities responsible for disposing of “an absolutely incredible amount” of waste.

Cllr Burke said: “We can’t magic away the environmental harm associated with other people’s consumption. People placing the ball to solve the problem of their excess consumption in the court of local authorities is deeply unfair.

“We have a statutory responsibility to process the waste, but unfortunately we don’t have a statutory right to help drastically limit the amount of waste that residents produce.

“Unlike landfill, what we can do over time is clean up the activities of the incinerator further. The scope to further decarbonise material once it’s been landfilled is very low – it’s in there, and it will continue to produce emissions.

“Incineration has environmental externalities, and they are the products of other people’s consumption. We have the responsibility to deal with the waste, and we feel that we’ve alighted at the most environmentally efficient method of processing that material in the long-term.”

Burke added that the North London Waste Authority, of which he is a member, will, as an interim measure towards achieving carbon capture and storage at the plant, begin totting up the cost of offsetting plans, pointing to the need for the UK to address the climate crisis by planting a forest “the size of Yorkshire”.

The eco boss has maintained that there is an “extremely strong incentive” for a reduction of waste to go to Edmonton, freeing up capacity for other London boroughs who use landfill, or transport their waste to be incinerated in Europe.

Campaigners have pointed to the aim of freeing up capacity as acknowledgement that a large facility is not necessary, adding: “Selling off incinerator capacity would only move demand for rubbish elsewhere. Since when is Hackney Council in the business of building a large bonfire-in-a-box for other councils to burn their rubbish in?”

The Town Hall has pledged that when it produces a budget of all of its carbon emissions, those associated with the waste system will be “priced in”, though has said that at this stage it is “difficult” to know how many tonnes will be saved by the move to reduce bin collections.

The council also hopes to further push down the amount of waste it incinerates through other initiatives, including estate recycling programmes and reverse vending machines.

Burke has also hinted at the introduction of future measures around the ‘Polluter Pays’ principle, which ensures that those responsible for the production of emissions bear the cost of paying for it.

Campaigners have condemned the justification of the new incinerator’s construction as being the only alternative to landfill as “the sort of narrow, binary thinking that we need to get away from”, as well as calling for a moratorium on all new incinerators.

However, Burke dismissed the idea of a moratorium, warning that the existing 50-year-old plant faces the possibility of a catastrophic failure, saying that it could “fall over at any moment”.

While accepting that incineration produces CO2 emissions, Burke has also robustly defended the benefits a new plant could bring, pointing to the electricity generated being enough for 127,000 homes, as well as heat for Edmonton’s forthcoming Meridian Water development.

The public realm chief also dismissed fears over the release of particulate matter by the incinerator, saying that “extremely stringent” EU directives around the burning of waste ensure that the “overwhelming majority” are captured, adding that Guy Fawkes Night produces more particulate matter than all UK incinerators’ annual output.

Burke said: “If people don’t have, unlike Hackney Council, a plan to eliminate waste, then they don’t have a plan to decarbonise the waste system. Their arguments are basically ‘Take the problem somewhere else’.

“I’m a practical environmentalist, and my job is to figure out, after we’ve extracted that energy from the waste, how we deal with the remaining externalities.

“I’ve heard some arguments from people that are completely impractical and implausible. Why don’t you separate out all the waste, then with plastics wash them all and store them in the ground as a carbon sink. That ignores the fact that plastics degrade over time and release VOCs.

“The second thing they ignore is that the process of cleaning plastic which is contaminated through the waste stream is massively water and energy intensive.

“Nobody has been able to adequately explain, even if you get to that point, how you commute the environmental costs associated with the waste water treatment of washing plastics, which will also abrade in the water releasing vast amounts of microplastic particles.

“We believe in owning the responsibility for the emissions that you produce, but when it comes to the waste system, it’s not the council that’s producing this waste, it’s the market and its consumers who are consuming more than they ought to be.

“I often say to people who don’t advance any credible alternatives to the proposals that we’ve got, ‘When you stop producing waste, I’ll stop burning it’.”