from Sunday Herald, 15 July 2001
At least five massive new waste incinerators are being planned around Scotland despite growing evidence that they frequently emit a cocktail of toxic chemicals that breach legal pollution limits.
The Sunday Herald can reveal that rubbish companies are now finalising plans for municipal waste incinerators in the Highlands, Grampian, Fife, Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. These would all emit dioxins linked to cancer and would fly in the face of the national strategy to reduce and recycle more waste.
There is also evidence that Scotland's only large-scale operating incinerator in Dundee has breached its safety limits 19 times over the last two months. Efforts to restart the plant, closed after a fire last September, have resulted in emissions of poisonous chemicals in breach of the authorisations laid down by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA).
The company that runs the Baldovie plant, Dundee Energy Recycling Limited, notified SEPA of 18 separate breaches of the limits between April 20 and May 28. These included releases of nitrogen oxides, hydrogen chloride and volatile organic compounds - which would include dioxins - because of blockages, equipment failures and other problems.
"There were some difficulties which we reported, but we have moved on," claimed a spokeswoman for the company. She said she was "not aware" of any further breaches since May.
But the Sunday Herald has discovered there was another major incident on June 19 which will lead to the company filing a formal report with SEPA. A spokesman for SEPA said that a lot of black dust had poured from the incinerator for an hour after filter bags suddenly burst.
The pollution emission dials went off-scale, so there were no readings for the amounts that were discharged. The incinerator was shut down and the operators are trying to find out why the filter bags, which were new, had failed.
Perhaps the most controversial of the proposed incinerators is to be sited in the Inverness area. Four private companies are preparing bids to handle the 175,000 tonnes of waste produced in Highland Council every year.
The council is expecting the bids to include incineration, as well as recycling and composting. "I do not believe that we can recycle and compost our way in the foreseeable future to a successful waste strategy," said Highland's head of waste strategy, Henderson Pollock.
One of the companies in the running, the French-owned SITA, confirmed last week that its bid would include an incinerator. The plans are likely to meet with fierce local opposition. "It's horrific. I think the whole concept is utterly flawed," said Donnie Macleod, an organic farmer near Ardesier, one of the possible sites. "Regardless of how well they perform, incinerators will put dioxins into the air. Why should we pollute the Highland air?"
SITA is also behind plans for an incinerator near Aberdeen to burn up to 3.75 million tonnes of the city's waste over the next 25 years. A planning application for a site between Torry and Nigg to the south of the city is due within the next few months.
Another company called Alba Regeneration and Power, which is associated with Scottish Coal, is preparing planning applications for waste incinerators at old open cast mines at Westfield in Fife and then at Killoch and Piperhill in Ayrshire.
Alba and a local businessman also have plans for new incinerators in North Lanarkshire, those these are less advanced. The rash of new plants has been prompted by new European legislation obliging countries to drastically reduce the amount of waste they dump as landfill.
"Scotland is faced with a simple choice: we can go down the incineration route or we can go for high recycling and composting. It is clear that waste companies and some councils want us to go for incineration, while the public are keen on recycling," said Dr Richard Dixon, head of research at Friends of the Earth Scotland.
"The choices we make in the next 12 months will determine whether we spend the next three decades in a polluted, wasteful Scotland or change to the kind of resource-efficient, recycling society we deserve in the 21st century. If these incinerators are built Scotland will continue to sit at the bottom of the European recycling league."
He also urged environment and rural development minister Ross Finnie to stop the Highland incinerator because it ignored the regional waste strategy being developed with SEPA.
The Executive said there was a clear hierarchy of options for dealing with waste - reduce, reuse then recycle. "There is a place for energy-from-waste facilities when they represent the best practical and environmental option," said a spokeswoman. "However they should not be viewed as a replacement for landfill when there are better options.''
Greenpeace pointed out that even if emissions stayed within new European limits, they were still dangerous. "A single plant will pump out enough dioxins every day to give a quarter of a million people the maximum "tolerable daily intake" as defined by the World Health Organisation," said the group's Mark Strutt.
