DOVE

A Question mark today hangs over whether a controversial waste-burning incinerator at Saltend will begin operations as planned.

The decision by the Environment Agency to revoke a crucial permit for the plant also makes it unclear whether the region's two local councils will achieve their joint 45 per cent waste recycling target in the next three years.

After securing planning permission for the £30m development in Saltend, near Hedon, a year ago, waste firm WRG hoped it would be up and running by 2010.

But, as exclusively revealed on the Mail's website on Saturday morning, the Environment Agency has now revoked an operating permit originally granted to the firm last year.

It follows a legal challenge made to the agency last year about a similar incinerator in Newhaven, Sussex.

Its licence was withdrawn, prompting local campaigners and Friends Of The Earth to start their own legal activity, with the Saltend licence also now revoked.

The agency has said it intends to review its procedures concerning the permits, but has yet to give any details of the likely timescale.

Any new permit application from WRG will have to wait until the review is completed, potentially delaying the start of operations at Saltend.

John Dennis, spokesman for Hull and Holderness Opposing the Incinerator, said: "We never let this die. We lost the battle over planning permission, but we have won this one. We regard it as worth fighting for, but it is not done and dusted."

The case in Newhaven saw a resident challenge the Environment Agency after it and waste firm Veolia said the effect of an incinerator's CO2 emissions on global warming would be "infinitesimally small".

But the agency later admitted it had not stuck to its own procedures to properly investigate the effect CO2 emissions could have on the environment. This left the permit vulnerable to challenge by campaigners and the agency capitulated.

A spokesman for the Environment Agency said: "As a responsible regulator we believe public funds are better spent on robust and transparent determination of the application, rather than unnecessary litigation."

Paul Tomes, contractor manager for WRG in Hull and the East Riding, said: "Obviously there will be some delays in the process of Saltend being built but we are confident we can supply sufficient information for the Environment Agency to issue us with a new permit."

Incinerator's cost doubles

The construction costs of a controversial incinerator project have more than doubled from original estimates.

A total of £145.7 million will now have to be paid by waste contractor Veolia just to prepare the site in Newhaven and to build the incinerator.

Last night Brighton and Hove City Council agreed to help Veolia meet its financial burden by extending the life of the contract from 25 to 30 years.

A copy of the papers, leaked to Lewes MP Norman Baker, suggests that Veolia claimed that the waste contract, agreed four years ago, was no longer profitable and would have to be extended by five years.

Under the contract Veolia is liable for all increased costs to the project but councillors feared that without help the contractor would go bankrupt causing the project to collapse. Veolia faces a rise in construction costs from £71.7 million to £145.7 million.

Councillors feared that if they refused to extend the contract Veolia would walk away.

The project would then have to be put back out to tender and be likely to cost even more.

In the meantime, European rules would see the councils face big fines for failing to cut the amount of waste dumped in landfill sites. Extending the contract was the lesser of two evils - and some even regard it as a good result for the taxpayer over the long term.

The project is already two years behind schedule because of delays in submitting planning applications.

Both councils are so keen to see it completed they have also promised a blank cheque to Veolia for any legal costs that arise if opponents of the scheme challenge it in the courts.

Veolia is also thought to have been granted an indemnity against costs if the incinerator project falls through, meaning it will get back at least some of the money it has spent so far. It is understood that councillors were told that the costs of not accepting Veolia's demands would have been significantly more than agreeing to the revised contract.

In 2003, a 25year contract was signed between East Sussex, Brighton and Hove and Veolia, the world's second biggest waste management operator.

The contract was dubbed a "25-year monopoly" by opponents and has attracted sustained opposition for plans to build a waste sorting centre in Hollingdean, Brighton, and the incinerator in Newhaven.

Despite protests, both schemes have cleared all major legal hurdles and work at the Brighton site has begun.

And even though the project has a £1 billion price tag almost nothing is known about the financing or the costs of the buildings or services.

Councillor Keith Taylor, Green convenor, said: "Any significant changes to a public contract such as this should be explained to the public. "There is a fine balance to be struck between protecting commercially sensitive information and being accountable to the taxpayer."

Councillor Gill Mitchell, leader of the Labour group, said: "This decision to hold this debate in closed session was justified because matters concerning commercially confidential information were discussed and needed to be protected."

Conservative Mary Mears, deputy leader of the city council, refused to comment on the decision, saying only that the discussion contained financial figures that were confidential.

Liberal Democrat councillor Paul Elgood said: "Residents should be extremely concerned about what they're not being told by the council. We call on Brighton and East Sussex to make a full disclosure in the public interest."

Lewes MP Norman Baker plans to complain to the Audit Commission and the European Union.

He said: "This is a criminal waste of taxpayers' money and represents the Arthur Daley school of economics.

"The councils appear to be determined to throw good money after bad in their blinkered determination to bulldoze through this incinerator. They are recklessly gambling with our money."

Incinerator pollution "would be worse than plutonium"

Retired GP Dr Dick Van Steenis joined Lewes MP Norman Baker last night at a meeting for protesters fighting the 14,000 square metre facility due to open in 2010.

Dr Van Steenis, who has advised four parliamentary enquiries on pollution and the environment, said particles emitted from the controversial plant would be "worse than plutonium" and "worse than polonium 210."

Mr Baker, who opened the speeches, described the waste local plan, which sited the plant in Newhaven, as a disgrace.

Dr Van Steenis said microscopic poisonous particles that enter the lungs and the body would create a 15-mile fallout zone around Newhaven.

This unregulated pollution, he said, would cause asthma at first then, as exposure continued, birth defects, infant mortality, heart attacks, cancers, strokes and diabetes.

He said: "For 15 miles around Newhaven prevailing winds would mean an arc of pollution poisoning that would affect Lewes badly, Brighton, Peacehaven, Hailsham and Eastbourne.

Dr Steenis is compiling a report for the Dump the Dump campaign that will be passed on to local councils.

Mr Baker pledged to look at his evidence and take it to the Department for Health.

He claimed Newhaven had been chosen for the incinerator because it was less attractive than other areas of Sussex.

He added: "The waste local plan consultation was a stitch up between officers from East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove City Council who had decided, "We must have an incinerator in Newhaven" on day one.

"They said bung it down in Newhaven because people in Newhaven don't count very much.

"And now the last thing they will want to do is minimise waste because it will affect their contract.

"There are councils in the country that are now being fined for not providing enough waste."

Council reports had failed to measure pollution at the level they should have, Doctor Van Steenis said, unlike in America where legislation was brought in 20 years ago to stop the killer industrial particles being emitted.

He said: "There is no protection for you in the UK. In America they woke up. They realised pollution was killing people and they realised it was these levels."

Jane Wilde, of the East London Community Recycling Partnership, also spoke at the meeting at the Brighthelm Centre in Brighton.

She runs a scheme were compost from food waste is being collected door to door to minimise waste.

Expert claims incinerator will cause baby deaths

A new waste incinerator could create a "fallout zone" that would shorten people's lives by up to 12 years, a leading expert has claimed.

Retired GP Dr Dick van Steenis said cancer rates are likely to soar, babies' lives will be put at risk and thousands living in a 15-mile radius of Newhaven could suffer health problems if the plant is built.

He believes the incinerator could cause a 480 per cent rise in cancer cases within 20 years - across a danger zone including Brighton and Hove, Lewes, Eastbourne, Polegate and Hailsham.

Veolia, the firm behind the incinerator, said his comments were at odds with the Health Protection Agency's conclusion that "modern well-managed waste incinerators will only make a very small contribution to background levels of air pollution".

Dr van Steenis, who has advised four parliamentary inquiries on pollution and the environment, said tens of thousands of people could suffer if the 14,000sqm site opens in 2010 as planned. He said the most damaging emissions would not be filtered out by the incinerator.

And he claimed living within 15 miles of the incinerator could lead to "sky high" rates of infant mortality, asthma and autism.

Dr van Steenis said: "The peak of health risk will be located within the first 7.5 miles so Lewes is going to take the brunt of it. Birth defects, infant deaths, asthma, autism - cases of which are five times higher in these polluted areas - heart attacks, all will rise as a result.

"Even the IQs of the children could be affected - all because of the incinerator."

East Sussex County Council chiefs approved the plans earlier this year. The Government decided not to call in the application despite a long-running campaign with nearly 15,000 written objections.

Dr van Steenis has given evidence in a number of public inquiries into incinerators and waste sites. He has campaigned for more stringent standards to apply to incinerators for 12 years after researching the health of families living around 15 different plants.

He said: "The effects were all the same - health suffers. It's not just the elderly who are dying but people in their 50s too. They have a huge impact on health."

In eastern Enfield, downwind of Britain's largest incinerator in Edmonton, London, the death rate for babies up to a year old is between 10 and 12 per thousand - more than twice the national average.

Anti-incinerator campaigner Gary Alderson said: "They are putting our lives and our children's lives at risk. Incineration is not the way forward and there needs to be an immediate rethink."

Veolia last night maintained that the Newhaven plant would be safe and said it could not find a report that supported the claims of Dr van Steenis. A spokesman said Veolia could assure people that the proposed energy recovery facility in Newhaven was safe.

He said: "The Environment Agency has granted the facility a pollution prevention and control permit and has stated that this facility does not cause a threat to the environment or human health'."

INCINERATOR FUMES LINK TO INFANT DEATHS

Researchers have established a significantly higher death rate among children up to one year old when they live under smoke from an incinerator chimney.

There is a lower death rate for children who live out of the path of incinerator emissions.

The report comes after a detailed analysis of death rates across the country.

Dr Dick van Steenis, a retired GP who helped head the study, said: “The incinerators are burning all sorts of material from domestic waste to hazardous chemical and radioactive waste.

“The danger comes from the particles released into the atmosphere. They are of a size that can be easily inhaled into the lung where they lodge and cause damage to the body.”

The most damaging particle, known as PM 2.5, is particularly harmful to youngsters he said. “Newborn babies are more likely to succumb to damage from chemical pollutants in these inhaled particles.” He added: “Around every single incinerator, infant mortality rates, asthma rates and autism rates are sky-high.

“That’s if you live under the smoke stream from the chimney. In areas nearby which don’t get the smoke, the death rate is either at the national average or lower.”

The data has been collected from the latest official statistics covering the years 2003 to 2005.

Enfield in north London has the UK’s largest incinerator at Edmonton. The death rate for babies up one year old in west of the borough is virtually nil.

But in eastern Enfield, which sits downwind of the incinerator and is exposed to smoke from the chimney, the death rate is between 10 and 12 per thousand of population. The national average death rate for babies up to a year is 5.2 per thousand.

Dr van Steenis said that he had accounted for other factors that could increase the death rate such as social deprivation. He pointed out, for example, that “leafy middle-class areas” of west London were affected by emissions from a big incinerator at Colnbrook near Slough. In some parts around this plant infant mortality rates are treble the national average.

“We compared those areas with nearby well-to-do wards that didn’t get emissions and they were significantly lower than the national average.”

Professor Vyvyan Howard, an expert on environmental pollution from the University of Ulster, said dioxins released in the burning of rubbish had been shown to be cancer causing.

He said that while incinerator filters take out 99 per cent of particles, it is the ultra fine one per cent – the PM 2.5s – that can have chronic effects on health.

London Waste, which owns the Edmonton incinerator, said it had not seen the van Steenis report. A spokesman said: “We use a proven technology with a track record of safe operation and it is recognised throughout Europe as a safe and efficient method of energy generation.

“There is no consistent evidence that our facilities cause adverse health effects.

“We continually monitor particulates such as PM 2.5s and the levels released are lower than the maximum permitted.”

No inquiry over incinerator plant

A public inquiry will not be held into proposals for a waste incinerator in an East Sussex town, after the government decided not to call the plans in.

East Sussex County Council said Local Government Secretary Ruth Kelly had ruled her intervention "would not be justified" over the Newhaven facility.

The "Energy from Waste" plant sparked street protests and 15,000 written objections from opponents.

Campaign group Dove said incinerators posed significant environmental and health hazards.

The facility, earmarked for a North Quay site in Newhaven, will generate electricity by processing 210,000 tonnes of waste a year from East Sussex and Brighton & Hove.

The county council said the waste would therefore be diverted from landfill, and power to 16,500 homes would be produced.

At a previous planning meeting in February, the council imposed 44 conditions covering noise and dust issues on the operator Veolia in order for planning consent to be given.

A legal agreement will need to be signed on proposed lorry routes and off-site planting and landscaping.

GREEN Party Euro-MP Caroline Lucas has written to Government Office of the South East demanding a full planning inquiry into East Sussex County Council's decision to grant planning permission for a waste incinerator in Newhaven.

Her letter, formerly requesting the Government calls-in the decision by the Tory-led council, echoes arguments already made by scores of local campaigners and the group Defenders of the Ouse Valley (DOVE).

Dr Lucas argues the decision should be reversed as a waste incinerator would increase pollution, traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, due to the high number of local objections (over 16,000), due to the adverse impact an incinerator would have on the adjacent South Downs Area of Natural Beauty and because the planning application breaches planning guidance and the agreed local plan.

The MEP said: "An incinerator at Newhaven would have a massive impact on the local community, boosting traffic levels, pumping out toxic pollution and increasing the risk of flooding.

"It would tie Brighton and Hove and East Sussex councils into a long-term contract to burn waste rather than re-use of recycle it and it contravenes and conflicts with both the Government's and East Sussex County Council's own planning guidance - the decision to allow it to be built must be examined again at a full planning inquiry.

"Waste incinerators are not - as the European Parliament agreed last month - in any way a 'green' solution to dealing with rubbish.

Her call for an inquiry follows a decision by East Sussex County Council to grant permission for the incinerator to be built at North Quay, Newhaven, despite the well-documented environmental and health risks and more than 16,000 local letters of objection.

South-East England's Green Party MEP added: "We are drowning in a sea of waste and if we are to tackle it we must adopt strategies to cut the amount of waste we produce in the first place rather than the defeatist 'predict and provide' approach embodied in the decision to build this incinerator.

"There would simply be no need to incinerate waste at all if the Government had the commitment and courage to adopt a 'zero waste strategy' such as that employed successfully in Canada and parts of Australia ."

Tories reveal anti incinerator credentials

Pressure is mounting on council bosses to drop the option for an incinerator at Costessey after a senior Conservative revealed opposition to burning waste.

Shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth said a major expansion of incineration plants could not be justified without further research into recycling.

His views contrast with the Conservative-controlled Norfolk County Council, which has kept incineration as one of its options to deal with the county's waste.

The news coincides with plans by campaigners to hold a public meeting on the anniversary of a successful event hosted by the Evening News as part of our campaign against incinerators.

In a letter to anti-incinerator campaigners, Mr Ainsworth, the Conservative shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, said: "The substantial increase in proposed incineration is coming at the expense of a successful and ambitious recycling strategy.

"I believe far more analysis needs to be undertaken into ways of improving the way we deal with waste before a major expansion of incineration could be justified."

Australian engineer lands Lancashire recycling deal

· £2bn waste disposal project will create 380 jobs
· Process turns household rubbish into compost

An Australian company that has developed an environmentally friendly system for disposing of household waste is close to signing a £2bn contract with Lancashire and Blackpool councils.

The 25-year deal, agreed under the government's private finance initiative, covers 1.4 million people and 775,000 tonnes of waste a year, and is due to be finalised in the next few days.

David Singh, development director at Global Renewables, said the company's system substantially reduces the amount of household waste going to landfill sites - which produce greenhouse gases - and avoids the need to incinerate waste.

"Globally, we can't continue to plunder the world's resources and then bury the refuse on our doorstep," said Mr Singh.

Defenders of the Ouse Valley and Estuary

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