Forum topic: Young climate activists quizz Enfield North MP on Edmonton incinerator

Some mightily impressive early career interviewers / politicians!
A small number of points, with current relevance, which may assist anyone who has listened to ex NLWA board member Feryal Clark MP’s interview.
The early reference to an austerity impact on previous plans refers to HMG’s withdrawal of PFI credits (c£600m) to the then NLWA plan for a Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) solution for residual waste. Crucially this large funding loss did not result in a “pause and reflect” of the revised circumstances. That we are still paying financially (tens of millions of pounds) for this willingness to carry on come what may - until the project collapsed - was recently highlighted to NLWA board members by the PWA as a lesson from the past well worthy of reflection given current incinerator uncertainties.
Her, surely correct plea, for us all to recycle more may however have unintended consequences if and when the new incinerator is built. Its 700ktpa (thousand tonnes per annum) capacity is to be made up of two 350ktpa lines. This is not a variable control switch but rather a single huge step up or down in the available production level. More recycling in North London therefore implies less residual waste and so less local feedstock for the incinerator. The gap would then be made up from imported (to North London) feedstock, or has happened elsewhere, by burning our recyclate. That’s a significant future project implication. Waste prevention should have always been the priority.
One mitigating factor on the incinerator project would have been for the boroughs to have accepted the mayor’s waste management tonnage requirement for North London, the apportionment. This is a figure noticeably lower than the waste we actually produce. (Other areas of London have been targeted with more than their actual waste production so that in aggregate London’s total forecast needs are met between all the boroughs.) Instead, the seven councils, including our own, decided to ignore this and let the NLWA determine need. The resulting NLWA forecast could best be described as racy, way above the apportionment requirement and now, with the evidence of actual data for early years, looks unsupportable. It is a live issue under the current NLWP process. The data difference could have been an incinerator roughly half the size now being planned.
So one outstanding mystery is why did an earlier Enfield Council agree to plan on a non-apportionment basis? At last November’s NLWP public hearing the author of the West London Waste Plan, itself based on the apportionment, raised the same point. That is something else we are now paying the price for.

https://greenworld.org.uk/article/government-action-efw-plants-too-little-too-late

New incinerators threaten to add up to 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions per year in the UK - yet the North London Waste Authority, with the support of all the boroughs involved, insists that its Edmonton vanity project is environmentally friendly.

Evidence, if we needed any, that Energy From Waste (ie incinerators) is reducing the likelihood of curbing greenhouse emissions comes from the government's own official Climate Change Commission:

“If EfW plants under construction and granted planning approval in the UK were all built, and plant utilisation rates remained unchanged, this would add 3-10 MtCO2e/year to UK emissions. To prevent this major increase, either a substantial fraction – potentially a majority – of the EfW plant pipeline will have to remain unbuilt, EfW fleet utilisation rates will have to fall, or else carbon capture and storage (CCS) will need to be installed on plants from the mid/late-2020s onwards to mitigate the additional emissions.”

What Jenny Jones, a Green member of the House of Lords, is saying here applies totally to the Edmonton incinerator - its existence will distort the entire waste policy in north London, either that or it will simply be abandoned, having cost councils a fortune.

"Along with incinerators comes a whole contractual arrangement that binds local authorities into a climate-damaging system of providing the fuel (the packaging and things we throw away) that makes these polluting towers financially viable. As local authorities have rapidly reduced the amount of waste they send to landfill, most of them have diverted their lorries to carry the waste for burning instead.

"A whole new generation of EfW plants is in the planning system, yet the amount of residual waste going to landfill, or being exported, has declined to the point where there won’t be enough to fuel the fires. The result of doubling our capacity to burn waste will be financial pressures to find new sources of waste, and that means either importing the stuff or reducing the amount that is recycled."

For incinerator related issues linked to post #5842 plus more, submissions from both Extinction Rebellion and Stop the Edmonton Incinerator, as well as those from all other consultees to the latest stage of the North London Waste Plan, are now available via https://www.nlwp.net/examination/ .
That from the North London Waste Authority certainly stands out, for while claiming to have no plans for the Pinkham Way site, their own submission focuses on nothing other than problems they may encounter when developing the same. Draw your own conclusions.