Stop the Edmonton incinerator

Karl,
This smacks of the Pinkham Way project. Apart from the same proponents and their same desire to push ahead regardless of the facts, is there a connection with PW in terms of handling waste?

Colin asks about any waste connections between Pinkham Way and Edmonton. Yes, and let me try to relatively briefly outline.
The North London Waste Authority (NLWA) is the Waste Disposal Authority for the seven North London Councils (Enfield, Waltham Forest, Barnet, Haringey, Camden, Hackney, and Islington). They have a statutory duty to dispose of municipal waste – that’s basically household stuff. These eight partner authorities operate under a strategy called the North London Joint Municipal Waste Strategy. The current version expires in 2020 and included such targets as 50% recycling (currently at 29% and going backwards). It was finished urgently and skewed at that time to reflect the desire to build a fuel pellet from waste site on Pinkham Way under then available PFI contracts. The plan needed lots of favourable assumptions, and money, and not surprisingly to many of us crashed into the ground – PWA will say because of them, the NLWA will say because despite the related nine figure sum by then spent (yes) they thought of a better way at the last minute.
Fuel pellets from waste is no longer an option in the world of waste, and never should have been.
Having long argued the Edmonton incinerator was no longer fit for purpose and couldn’t be repaired, miraculously after this failure they reversed that thinking too. Now it’ll tootle on just long enough to sort all the requirements to build a bigger one on the overall site.
The case for this new one needed herculean estimates of future waste volumes and awful levels of recycling; together maximising the amount of residual (black bin) waste to burn.
Both assumptions were nonsense and now look transparently so. But the case had been made, and was agreed.
All this is the NLWA and 7 boroughs.
Sitting above all this, in theory, is the North London Waste Plan (NLWP) put together by the seven boroughs (only is the theory) and addressing all waste in North London (Municipal waste, the domain of the NLWA, is less than a third of all waste).
The 10 year NLWP has been in preparation for something like the same period of time and has kept many a consultant in wages. The latest attempt went to public examination in November 2019 and didn’t do well at all under questioning. My money is on it necessarily going back to GO, albeit I understand the boroughs believe they have enough sticky tape to still make a job of it. We’ll see.
This wider, umbrella strategy, includes the identification of (any) land needed to process waste in North London. So you need waste forecast, existing capacity, capacity optimisation opportunities, other key metrics and more. You also need to have some idea of what you plan to do as a strategy over the medium term (15 years). As the independent inspector put it in summary, there are a lot of major issues with the NLWP.
Basically there’s no strategy effective at any level, no one knows what they’re doing in an integrated strategic manner and so things are taken forward on an opportunistic basis. It costs us Council Taxpayers shedloads of otherwise useable cash a fortune as a result.
Then back to PW. The NLWA bought it, paying over the odds under their first waste pellet plan. Now they are stuck with it and if it reverts to green field there’s a non-trivial chance that their balance sheet will look silly. So best try to find a waste use for it, although they can’t say that for technical reasons in the NLWP, not least for that would stop part of it being available for housing – oh, another strand going on.
In summary, it’s all the same messy pot and the same actors wasting our cash.
There's a major issue relating to the "green" aspect of PW, and that's essentially PWA; and a second issue relating to the need for a viable strategy for all this, and that's basically me.
Developing an effective waste strategy? 6 months tops for a capable team of 3.
Any need for PW? Not a supportable case in all the years I've followed this. Some very dodgy numbers over the years trying to make the case mind you.

Will the not in our back yard brigaded who generate the waste, please tell us the alternative to the plans to up grade the present system to a more environmental one , as for the pinkam way site I lived, brought up and played there when it was a rubbish's dump and sewerage farm not a nature reserve no complaints and would be best served the people of Haringey as a waste disposal site so they don't have to transport it to Enfield

The “not in my backyard brigade who generate the waste” are the approximately two million residents of the North London boroughs plus waste from all associated organisations – commercial, industrial, demolition, excavation and a few smaller more specialise strands. Under the Edmonton plans in particular, that back yard will extend to a 50 mile radius of the plant for commercials waste. That’s a very big back-yard.
As for alternatives, yes they exist, indeed the NLWA spent the best part of £200m quite recently pushing one to destruction. We’ll all be paying for that for a long time yet. The £1.2m latest estimate for the latest build will be a 40 year bill for all of us residents. Get it wrong and that’s capital and revenue not available for a myriad of other worthy purposes.
Pinkham Way? The sewerage plant closed in 1963. Undeveloped for roughly 55 years, it includes Metropolitan Open Land (MOL), the edge of an ecological corridor, and is a Grade 1 Site of Importance for Nature Conservation (SINC). It is part of a larger ecological complex and corridor including other SINCs (and MOL) e.g. (Hollickwood Park, Muswell Hill Golf Course, Tunnel Gardens, Bluebell Wood, Albert Road Rec and Rhodes Avenue Spinney). So quite important, given the current focus on environmental matters.
The most recent specialist estimate put its clean-up costs alone in the order of £50m, albeit what is under the 13m or so of clay capping might make this sum more and will, reports indicate, inevitably increase the flood risk into the Pymmes Brook and other watercourses further towards the Thames as its hydrological buffering capacity is lost.
As for Pinkham Way best serving the people of Haringay to avoid the need for them to transport waste to Enfield, maybe I’ll just ask – does it indeed go there or to the Hendon rail transfer station? And what constitutes “better”, for that is unquestionably a matter the independent Inspector has been forced to ponder for several months now. As yet neither he nor the seven boroughs have been able to answer it.

I’m advised that social media has various comments on the waste situation, broadly NIMBY and TINA in form, and typically fact-free supporting a layer of anger. So,

NIMBY: rather than simply the two sites mentioned (Edmonton, Pinkham Way) there are over 60 active waste sites in our area and another twenty or so others considered as part of the current draft NLWP. Our area’s waste is additionally exported to sites in over 70 other Waste Disposal Authorities and we import a roughly equivalent amount; so as I’ve pointed out previously, it’s a (very) big back yard that’s being considered. Fact-free off-the -cuff solutions simply won’t cut it in that matrix.

TINA: this was also the case with the Pinkham Way PFI, at least until they found an alternative.


The main focus is household waste (it’s what we tend to know best, even if it’s only the third largest waste segment). Here’s what’s been happening to that: we’re consistently generating less individually and as household units.



Against that, population has been growing and is expected to continue. So what’s the balanced outcome? The Waste Authority envisage (and have always envisaged) a never ending rise in waste. The reality, despite substantial population growth, has been precisely the opposite - something they have finally acknowledged, if not yet acted upon.



If this now established trend continues – and think about the increasing awareness and pressures on producers from eg climate aspects driving it – then 15 years out we could be looking at 700,000 tonnes of LACW (basically household waste) per annum. Apply the Mayor’s London recycling target of (at least) 65% to that – reasonable since this authority is roughly a quarter of London – and you’re left with about 250,000 tonnes of residual waste for disposal (burn or whatever). The new incinerator at Edmonton is going to be roughly three times that size. Once it is switched on it needs to be fed, at 700,000 tonnes pa, throughout its roughly 40 year expected lifetime.
Crude estimates I accept, but even if 100% out it is still significantly too big and seem to me that new data generates an argument to pause and reflect on the planned, and then irreversible, direction of travel.
That is unless it’s being deliberately set to be an income stream of course; North London as a waste incinerator centre for the greater south east to help with our stretched council budgets. That would be some story.
Otherwise, the Edmonton incinerator cost estimates have seemingly recently doubled (to £1.2bn). Add on running costs and it certainly is a costly solution. (The Waste Hierarchy is much cheaper – don’t consume as much, then, for what is consumed, repair, reuse, recycle and finally, if all that fails, then and only then, look at disposal options. Currently we run at a paltry 29% recycling rate, surely that should be a major focus of attention and resource? )
Get these things wrong and we do end up with real bills. Consider the Pinkham Way failure where related loans of £120m are being met over a period of years, in Enfield’s case through a budget line of £2m pa. The cost of the site plus various lawyers, consultants and others now exceeds £30m; that’ll be met via the annual payment for waste collected, ie absorbed and effectively hidden in our regular waste budgets; while the balance sheet continues to retain another £50m of Goodwill related to the project that very strong arguments indeed say should have been written off by now. Those arguments will get stronger shortly when the goodwill relates to a heap of rubble once Edmonton is redeveloped. That’s £200m give or take. A lot of school books.


So it needs to be the right decision and that, I suggest, can only be achieved by starting from a realistic and truthful base of facts relating to the current and future position. That would be the correct start point and something all too often absent from the last decade of waste resource planning. Consider, ten years to develop a fifteen year waste plan that still seems nowhere near completion, completely failing on recycling targets, hundreds of millions of sunk costs we are lumbered with as council tax payers, and all to show for it is a few hectares of field transferred from one local public authority ownership to another under a (hoped for) secret deal.


This is what the acting consultants said about the waste forecasts developed to support the Edmonton Incinerator:
• Providing forecasts of waste arisings for over thirty years in the future is extremely difficult … in essence it is unknowable (E.2.1)
• It is worth re-emphasising, however, that given the paucity of historical data there is limited scope for making accurate predictions (4.2)
• We would not normally advise forecasting for more than a very small number of years into the future on this basis (3.4)
• The use of this type of analysis for long-term projections remains questionable and open to challenge (3.4)
• One limitation of this type of analysis is the number of historical data points which are available (3.2)
• Although the quality of data has been steadily improving since 2000 (although vagaries remain), the time series for the datasets used are relatively short and the quality of data in the early years is questionable (3.2)
• the longer the dataset, the lower the average quality of the data becomes (3.3)
• There is also a danger in over-complicating matters with spurious levels of detail; detail which in and of itself is based on relatively high-level sampling and assumptions (4.5)
• to account for what we would speculate (author’s embolding) is the cumulative effect of waste prevention and minimisation measures (E.2.2)
• the analysis of a number of alternative scenarios show that waste arisings could vary significantly depending on the assumption made (4.11)

Or as the Waste Authority chose to view it: “The model was developed based on …. a robust analysis of historical trends and a robust set of assumptions about what will happen to these trends in the future.”

Check the chart above, one of several highly challengeable uses of data, all of which had the effect of increasing the planned incinerator capacity. My money certainly wouldn't be on the waste authority but sadly it is.


So of-course, lets run with it under NIMBY or TINA for surely there can't be a better way.

What's TINA? I do like an acronym...... though I thought the use of NIMBY was banned on here....?

Enjoyed reading the post though. Great to see the direction of travel ref household waste.

TINA was the BREXIT of it's day, attributed to a certain M Thatcher whose watchword was "There Is No Alternative " (that is to what ever her policy was)..and just as blind to alternatives.

The planned larger incinerator was one of the targets of the Extinction Rebellion demo in Enfield Town on Saturday (photo from a Facebook post by Hannah Dyson).

As mentioned by Karl, there have been discussions of what he wrote on PGC about the incinerator plans on social media, specifically in the Enfield Voices group .

In defence of the incinerator plans, Cllr Daniel Anderson posted this comment from the North London Waste Authority:

‘The North London Heat and Power Project (NLHPP) is the North London Waste Authority’s (NLWA’s) major investment to modernise the Edmonton EcoPark.

‘This piece of national infrastructure will replace the current energy from waste plant with a world-class ‘Energy Recovery Facility’ (ERF). It will also deliver flagship recycling facilities to support north London’s drive towards increased recycling. The project was consented by the Government in 2017 after extensive consultation and engagement with local communities over a number of years. Work is now underway and rapid progress was made in 2019 to prepare the site for construction. 2020 will be a landmark year, with work commencing on the new recycling facilities.

‘We appreciate the strength of feeling about tackling the Climate Emergency. As a waste authority we take seriously the responsibility to preserve resources for future generations. We work with our boroughs, including Enfield, to protect our planet through responsible and sustainable waste management.
We are very clear that opposition to the NLHPP is misplaced. The fact is the ERF is part of the solution for tackling the Climate Emergency. This is because it avoids waste being sent to landfill. The existing energy from waste plant at the EcoPark is reaching the end of its life and needs to be replaced.

‘There isn’t a ‘do nothing’ option.

‘The alternative would be to send the non-recyclable waste from our two million residents to landfill. Burying waste and leaving it to rot simply passes the problem to future generations. Landfill produces methane, a very damaging greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

‘Instead of landfilling, the state-of-the-art ERF will generate low-carbon heat and power from non-recyclable waste. This will be enough to provide energy for 127,000 homes – equivalent to all the homes in Enfield. It will be the most technically and environmentally advanced facility in the UK and possibly Europe when it is commissioned.

‘We calculate that the ERF will save the same amount of carbon dioxide as taking 110,000 cars off the road every year. This is why we can be clear that the North London Heat and Power Project is completely in keeping with the development of a net-zero carbon economy.

‘The ERF is one part of our major investment to modernise the EcoPark. We are also delivering wide- ranging facilities to boost recycling across north London. The flagship ‘Resource Recovery Facility’ will provide capacity to recycle thousands of tonnes of metal, wood and plastic every year. For the first time, residents will be able to bring their waste to a brand new reuse and recycling centre at the EcoPark. A new educational hub, called EcoPark House, will help people understand the importance of reducing their waste and developing a truly circular economy. It will also provide a modern new home for the Edmonton Sea Cadets.

‘This job-generating project is a significant contributor to Enfield’s plans for the regeneration of Edmonton. Alongside new skilled jobs, we are creating at least 100 apprenticeships and working in partnership with Enfield College to maximise these local opportunities. The project will support an extensive programme of skills training, with 225 opportunities available through the construction phase.

‘Our facilities are already instrumental in supporting jobs and businesses in the area. For example, the Ark Data Centre in Edmonton runs solely on energy produced by our existing plant. The new energy recovery facility will have even greater benefits for the local economy. It has the potential to provide low-carbon heat for the major mixed-use development at Meridian Water. We’re proud that our new facility can play such a crucial role in realising Enfield Council’s vision for this sustainable new community in the south of the borough.

‘A leaflet that provides more information about the NLHPP is available on the website, together with a detail led set of FAQs. It addresses the claims that have been made and explains the benefits the project brings for vital climate, social and economic agendas. It can be found here: northlondonheatandpower.london/‘

Cllr Anderson also stated that "Cllr Jon Burke who represents Hackney is one of the most committed green activists you will find. He serves on the NLWA and is fully behind the new incinerator".

“World class”, “flagship”, goodness I didn’t realise, perhaps I’m won over with the pride.
However, “North London’s drive towards increased recycling”, as with Enfield’s own, reported in today’s Independent newspaper, is actually going backwards; and as for the “extensive consultation and engagement with local communities over a number of years”, well, I even ended up resubmitting my own formal Stage 1 input as part of Stage 2 because it was completely ignored. That was ignored too, and I was one of a tiny number of respondees, because basically no one knew, or still knows, anything about it. Can anyone point to a single holistic report available to the public on the embryonic plans before its approval and while consolation and engagement was still possible I wonder?
As for the “truly circular economy” and this being “part of the solution” I do have to ask where this enormous burner fits with that and then just how it is positioned in the circular economies crucial waste hierarchy. (Clue – it’s nowhere near the top, that’s where the circular economy lies.)
I do agree there isn’t a do nothing option, but it certainly doesn’t follow that a 700,000 tpa burner, set in stone for the next 50 years, is the appropriate answer to a waste resource issue.
Maybe someone supportive can outline just why 700,000tpa - factually, based on current hard data, and in line with the waste type assumptions in Stage 1 and 2 consultations? As a follow on, maybe they can also explain what happens when (and I’m specifically not saying if) absolute waste levels fall sometime over the next five decades.

Sorry to nag on but this really does have turkey written all over it in large red lettering which risks becoming a terrible cost well beyond what is actually necessary – financial and environmental. If there ever is a reply from someone in the know, maybe they could additionally address a few basic points (latest official figures follow):
North London’s waste capacity 4.4m tpa
North London’s waste generated 2.9m tpa
North London’s resultant spare capacity therefore 1.6m tpa (that’s 55%)
As a net exported the actual surplus capacity implied is even more (60%).
Don’t forget the new incinerator will increase capacity even more (net 200k tpa).
And as one part of all-London – the North London sub region is roughly a quarter - which has an agreed approach to waste which allocates elements to parts such as North London to manage (called the apportionment and in place to ensure London as a whole doesn’t either over or undershoot its waste needs) why has North London added an additional 40% extra on top of what the Mayor asks of us and has been agreed in successive London Plans? Is it North London or the London Plan / Mayor which is out of line?

Francis Sealey of Enfield Voices has just recorded an online interview (webinar) with Carina Millstone, one of the leaders of the Stop the Edmonton Incinerator campaign. It was her presentation in Chingford that so impressed Karl and prompted the start of this discussion - you can download Carina's very comprehensive presentation slides .

Another relevant point is the news that Enfield council is about to launch a drive to increase recycling levels in the borough - see this story in the Enfield Independent . The more reycling, the less "residual" waste to burn.

“Heads should roll”, said an ex NLWA board member and Enfield Conservative leader in the local press after the last waste authority (NLWA) fiasco costing us ratepayers tens of millions of pounds. They didn’t, and the same heads then went on to develop a case for the Edmonton incinerator.
Whether committing to incineration is the sensible route for the next 30-50 years in these climate emergency times is one debate (the core issue for the Chingford based “Stop the Incinerator” campaign; also XR); the other being my own early stage involvement saying that even on their own highly-inflationary manipulated data, building for 700,000 tonnes pa was still about 300,000 tpa too much.
Because it was indeed too large, the intent rapidly moved to capture commercial waste in north London (not a waste stream in the remit of the NLWA, or in the original plan), then also commercial waste in a 50 mile radius of the plant. But commercial waste levels have a high recycling rate that’s getting better (north of 70%), which means less residual waste to burn and so back to a gap to fill 700,000 tpa.
As charts on earlier postings show, household waste levels are actually falling rather than rising as the business case required (and forecast). Recycling targets are now even higher; both combining to mean there is less waste left to burn.
Now, in a report to be submitted to the Authority meeting on 13th Feb, the NLWA MD is planning to reduce residual waste by increasing recycling. Again the result is there being less to burn. Bear in mind the 30-50 year clock hasn’t started ticking for we’re not even at foundation building stage yet already it’s strategic meltdown.
So the latest wheeze, highlighted by NLWA board member, Hackney Council Cabinet Member and “one of the most committed green activists you will find” – see post 29th Jan and the comment from our own ex NLWA board member is a new aim.

That’s certainly not in the original business plan, it’s not in the North London Joint Municipal Waste Strategy and it’s not in the North London Waste Plan which went to public examination only two months since after its approximate ten year gesticulation. So that’s surprisingly for such an explicit and far reaching “aim”. It seems that everyone – including the strategists, waste planners and business case writers - totally misunderstood what the incinerator is for. Now, at a recently doubled cost of about £1.2bn, we are to be host to pretty much anyone’s waste rather than follow the original intent. (Clue - because it’s too big and always was).
As I said in a 21 Jan posting in response to a question:-
Basically there’s no strategy effective at any level, no one knows what they’re doing in an integrated strategic manner and so things are taken forward on an opportunistic basis. It costs us Council Taxpayers shedloads of otherwise useable cash a fortune as a result.
Or on 29th Jan
this really does have turkey written all over it in large red lettering which risks becoming a terrible cost well beyond what is actually necessary – financial and environmental
So on the balance of probabilities that’s surely now a slam dunk.
What next? I forecast that the huge 40 year loans required for the Edmonton scheme will miraculously repay the £90m loans still outstanding from the last fiasco and allow for the write off of £50m of balance sheet goodwill, also from the last fiasco, something which must be causing the auditor many a sleepless night in signing off.
We can all then pay for two colossal errors for the next 40 years with a single regular loan repayment, and that might well be the most efficient part of the total exercise. Think of this next time councillor’s stress how tight council budgets are so we can’t possibly fund ……
And we also now know what happens when people are in a hole and don’t stop digging: it gets deeper and deeper.
As an alternative why not make it smaller (and cheaper) to actually fit the residual household waste we in North London produce and reasonably expect to produce? Probably not a “world class” “flagship” so just where would you hang your ego?

It's rather ironic that, in view of the length of time that the NLWP has been dragging on, and the size of the planned new incinerator, that Cllr Burke's Twitter page has at the top "Moving fast and fixing stuff. Small is beautiful"!

https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK

The NLWA 'Reducing Residual Waste' scheme which Karl Brown referred to also ties in the Circular Economy (CE) which is naturally emphasised in the London Plan, but was perhaps too inconvenient to be promoted in its natural home, the North London Waste Plan (the NLWP states that it's in favour of it - wow!)

CE's effect should be to reduce waste overall and increase recycling. So let's take an area's total waste to be 1 million tons, and the recycling rate @ 30%. We thus have 700,000 tons of residual, and 300,000 tons of recycling.

The reduction in overall waste resulting from a middling take-up of CE is c 20%, with perhaps an increase in recycling to 40%. In these circumstances we have 800,000 tons of waste, 320,000 tons of which is recycling. Thus the actual tonnage of recycling hardly changes.

But look at the residual waste - this is the feedstock for the new Edmonton plant. That falls from 700,000 tons to 480,000 tons, a fall of more than 30%. That does not make for a stable future for this new plant.

And the more that the NLWA has to search outside its own area, the more it goes directly against one of the main NLWP objectives, to reduce 'waste miles' - the distance that waste has to travel to reach its point of treatment.

And no prizes for guessing how it gets from perhaps way outside London to Edmonton.

Worth remembering also that the 30-year waste procurement, the last 'flagship' that the NLWA announced, quickly turned into the Marie Celeste.

Can we sign a petition online?

Yes, at https://governance.enfield.gov.uk/mgEPetitionDisplay.aspx?ID=231&RPID=81030704&HPID=81030704
Don't worry that there are only 86 signatures showing, Extinction Rebellion Enfield are pursuing this energetically, as well as Stop the Edmonton Incinerator Now, and we have lots more on paper.

Sorry for the delayed reply, I don't look at this website as often as I should - and I don't seem to be the only one (sorry Basil!)