Teesside has been designated as a key player in the country’s drive towards Net Zero. Indeed, Net Zero Teesside (NZT) states on their website that it is a “first-of-a-kind fully integrated gas-fired power and carbon capture project”, which will be vital in the plans to make Teesside the first decarbonized industrial cluster in the UK. Once operational, Net Zero Teesside Power claims that their “combined cycle gas turbine electricity generating station could produce up to 742 megawatts of flexible, dispatchable low-carbon power – equivalent to the average annual electricity requirements of more than 1 million UK homes”.
Waste incinerator research from Teesside
That all sounds very positive. However, recently published research from Jay Sinclair suggests that the picture on Teesside is not as rosy – and green – as it may appear. This research concentrates on the use of waste incinerators on Teesside to provide energy, noting that the practice is more than a little controversial. It is noted that there is considerable opposition to a number of incinerator proposals from local community groups and health advocates on Teesside. The research is aimed at challenging the notion that waste incinerators’ produced energy is framed as a “sustainable solution to both waste management and energy production by the technoscientific logics of industry”. It is claimed that this narrative presents incineration as a climate -friendly and low-risk route to stimulating economic growth, while “obscuring the slow, cumulative environmental harms experienced by communities”.
There has long been a shift on Teesside away from its carbon heavy industrial past towards a more carbon neutral future and part of this has been the development of “Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TVERF), a 450,000 tonne-per-year household waste incinerator at Teesport, Grangetown, commissioned by a consortium of seven North East Councils.” Although there has been opposition from a number of local groups, TVERF has been granted a licence by the Environmental Agency, meaning that It can be established.
Also set to be established are an energy from waste facility at Seal Sands, built by Green Energy Park Ltd and the Redcar Incinerator put forward by the Cleansing Service Group.
The research goes on to highlight two ways by which it is claimed that facilities such as these help to combat Climate Change; by reducing the reliance on fossil fuels and “by diverting waste from landfill, incineration is presented as a strategy to curb greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, which is released as organic waste decomposes”.
Local concerns
However, it is also reported that while some people on Teesside have been prepared to look away concerning environmental issues as they feel the need for work in the area is more important than environmental concerns, there have been many others who have expressed concerns and this has led to a new upsurge in environmental activism on Teesside. It has been noted that, “groups such as Medact North East and Stop Incineration North East have been vocal in their resistance, highlighting the public health and environmental risks these projects pose.”
It is little wonder that there are these concerns about new incinerator projects. Three years ago, the Scottish government produced a report stating that studies on Municipal Solid Waste Incineration (MSWI) was associated with birth outcomes, respiratory health effects, and cancers among other outcomes.
The opposition to the new incinerators on Teesside has come at a time when the area is already suffering higher than the national average health outcomes. A report by Health Equity North has stated that, people in Tees Valley and County Durham, are experiencing “extreme levels of deprivation with much higher child poverty rates, much lower life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, worse health across a wide range of conditions from strokes to cancer and much higher unemployment rates than the national average”.
Consequently, the research about waste incineration on Teesside notes that Medact North East and Stop Incineration North East have been calling on Northeast councils to invest in waste reduction and recycling, instead of incineration. However, despite the local opposition, government agencies continue to promote waste incineration and point to a 2019 government report that suggested that “modern, well run and regulated Municipal Waste Incinerators are not a significant risk to public health, as these incinerators only make a small contribution to local concentrations of air pollutants”.
In response to this, Jay Sinclair points out that Wilton 11 is documented as exceeding safe, legal limits and is still functioning. It is also noted that it is often the long and slow accumulation of pollutants that come from polluting facilities that can cause harm, which may not always be easy to detect.
The opposition has led to Redcar Council rejecting the Redcar Incinerator; however, the “Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility at Wilton and the Green Energy Park continue to move forward”. Sinclair suggests that these developments need to be contested by local people in the political arena.
Comment
As ever with environmental issues this is clearly a contested topic. However, one thing is surely for certain. While here in the Northeast, we are only too well aware that we need both investment and jobs, that must not be at the expense of public health, in a region which already has some of the worst health outcomes in the country. We must not allow ourselves to be used as some sort of poor region that can have any amount of toxic materials dumped on it, in the way that poor communities in the developing world often suffer.
It is vitally important that robust investigations are made into the health hazards of any new developments on Teesside and indeed in the rest of the Northeast. We must not allow our need for development and new jobs to put the health of ourselves and future generations at risk.
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