TUESDAY 31 OCTOBER 2000

MR MALCOLM CHILTON, MR TONY HIRONS AND MR KEITH COLLINS

  88. Can I welcome you to the second session of the Committee's inquiry into the Delivery of Sustainable Waste Management. I will ask you in a second to introduce yourselves for the record. Can I just stress that since you come as organisations which probably have conflicting views on quite a lot of issues, if you disagree please let us hear from you and, if you agree, once one person has said it we do not need to have it said again for the record. Would you like to introduce yourselves?

  (Mr Collins) I am Keith Collins. I am sitting in for Alan Watson who was coming from Wales but due to weather and rail disruption, it is not possible for him to be here. I am an Associate for Public Interest Consultants.[1]

  (Mr Chilton) Malcolm Chilton. I am Commercial Director of Energy Power Resources and here in my capacity as the former Chairman of EWA and an Executive Committee Member of the EWA.[2]

  (Mr Hirons) I am Tony Hirons, Communications Director of the Energy from Waste Association.

  Chairman: Thank you very much. Crispin Blunt.

  89. Gentlemen, welcome, and you in particular, Malcolm. It was rather over seven years ago that in an extremely brief period, about a week, I was quite likely to end up as Secretary for the Energy from Waste Association when I was working for Politics International who were your then political consultants. Happily Malcolm Rifkind took me away from that on appointment as special adviser, by which route I now sit here. Can I ask both you and Keith Collins, from the Waste Strategy 2000 what do you see as the likely future role for incineration in the United Kingdom?
  (Mr Hirons) If I can deal with that, Mr Blunt. Just to pick up very quickly from the strategy itself, which said that "The Government and the National Assembly for Wales believe that recovery of energy from waste through using it as a fuel has an important role to play alongside recycling and composting in a system of sustainable waste management. Energy from waste plants should be appropriately sized and care must be taken to ensure that contracts are sensitively designed to avoid crowding out recycling. They should be developed as part of an integrated system, and that includes other waste management options". That was how it was laid at the time. There has, I feel, been some movement away from that from the Government's side but the ideal is still there. Speaking to Members of the Government, officials from the DETR, that is still the role for energy from waste that they would see and from the EWA's point of view it is the role that we would see as part of an integrated waste management strategy and a waste management solution. We do not see energy from waste as the answer to it. Similarly, we do not see that energy from waste is the problem within it. It has to be in there alongside all the other options as Best Practicable Environmental Option to ensure that we meet what are extremely demanding targets.
  (Mr Collins) The strategy is going to result in one of two paths. One is that dozens of incinerators will be built, quite happily they are rolling out now, and they have been approved in Kent, in Slough and so on. That will proceed very, very rapidly to at least a quadrupling, I would say, of present capacity, at least a quadrupling. That is the Government's figure. I would suggest the most interesting thing is you might want to look through the Enviros Report with the Resource Recovery Forum, which you certainly would not regard as being a pro-recycling body or anti-incineration. If you look at its numbers what you see is that the only major country left in the Western World with a recycling rate under ten per cent is the United Kingdom. You see that if you run this strategy out for 15 years it will still be at the bottom of the pack. I suggest that I know of no other industry where that is the case. I am not sure that aiming to be behind everyone else in 15 years is how any other nation would go at this. I also note that if you look at the incineration rates in other nations—we always hear that the United Kingdom has to expand because other nations like the Danes and Swedes and so on have plenty—and I pulled out 18 nations, the UK sits at number nine already in energy from waste capacity, it is in the middle of the pack. The two leading are Japan and France. Japan has done a u-turn and announced it is cutting 20 per cent of its incinerator capacity in the next five years and doubling its recycling and composting. The French Ministry has announced the stabilisation of incineration capacity and is shutting a whole series of units down. I would suggest that overall that leaves the United Kingdom as the only nation I know of in the world with such an aggressive rate expansion of energy from waste.

  90. What interpretation do you put on the Government's change of tone in its attitude towards incineration? The DETR officials, who gave evidence last week, acknowledged that there has been a change of tone between the draft Directive and Waste Strategy 2000. Do you think that the Government are giving any clear indication of policy to the community? I will come back to whether industry are getting a clear indication from the Government.
  (Mr Collins) It is very clear from the Ministers—Michael Meacher and Stephen Byers—that they are now turning corners very rapidly, I would suggest, in moving the UK into line with the rest of the West. The DETR officers, let us say, are somewhat softer but still there are dozens of pieces of that strategy where, frankly, they just have carte blanche to burn. At the Environment Agency it is the same thing, it is the middle level management in the bureaucracy who make the signal unclear.
  (Mr Hirons) Can I come back to the Energy from Waste's point of view and draw your attention to a news release that was put out on 13 October which actually picked up on the case that had been put in some quarters that there could be up to 166 new plants being built.

  91. I think that was in A Way with Waste.
  (Mr Hirons) That is right. That was the worst case scenario in Part II of the National Waste Strategy.

  92. Which presumably you would regard as the best case scenario?
  (Mr Hirons) No. We have said that we would see the situation of between 15 to 20 plants being built in the next ten years. In our evidence, extrapolating that out to 2015, we could see a figure of between 40 and 50 maximum plants being built. I also pick up on what Mr Collins has said. There is a report which has been prepared by AEA Technology and the graph for that was in the evidence which we submitted. This showed the level of recycling energy from waste on landfill throughout the world. That is the colour version that was in the evidence. That put the United Kingdom, in terms of energy from waste, way below most of the 13 different countries that are there. Our view, which we stated at the time, which is in the evidence and which we would reiterate again, is that with the targets to be met and the massive amount of waste which is going to have to be taken away from landfill, particularly when somewhere between three to six per cent annually waste is arising, we are going to need all forms of waste prevention and then minimisation, recycling and all other aspects, to meet those targets. Energy from Waste, within the 40 to 50 maximum plants within the next 15 years, we would see are just part of an integrated strategy.

  93. Are those big ones or small ones?
  (Mr Hirons) I would say, apart from possibly within one or two urban conurbations, most of them are far more likely to be of 100,000, 150,000, 200,000 rather than 400,000, 500,000. Certainly I think as we go further ahead to 2015 and it doubles from maybe 15 to 40/45, that expansion is much more likely to be around the 100,000 mark, smaller plants, than it would be the larger ones.
  (Mr Chilton) The average plant size that we have today is about 200,000 tonnes if we divide the number of plants by the number of tonnes being burned. Up until 2010 we see that rough average maintaining and then beyond 2010 we would see the average plant size being around about 100,000 tonnes.
  (Mr Collins) In the last six months a 550,000 tonne plant was announced in Kent and 440,000 tonnes in the west of London, in Slough. I would suggest that in fact for at least the next 10 or 20 there are going to be an awful lot of very large burners. I would suggest on that 40 or 50, when you knock those numbers out nationally you think "40 or 50 we must find a place for somewhere", but if you just take London's share of that, that would be six or seven new incinerators for London. It would make good theatre to see that go ahead but I am not sure that it is good policy.

  94. I am not quite sure how those numbers stack up. In Surrey, for example, there are two incinerators proposed for a population of about one million people and that would seem to indicate more than 100 incinerators across the country if that was rolled out on a population basis. You drew on a report that was written by AEA Technology.
  (Mr Hirons) Yes.

  95. Are they not responsible for promoting renewables within the DTI?
  (Mr Hirons) They have a very wide role and that is one of the roles they would have to play.

  96. That would seem to indicate that they come to this slightly parti pris, would it not?
  (Mr Chilton) We should just be absolutely clear about this. We know how many new plants there are going to be better than my colleague does, with respect. There tends to be a six or even seven year development cycle on these plants through planning and tendering and the whole series of events that one has to go through. We know how many plants are in that cycle. Between now and 2010 we can be fairly accurate about our predictions and they are given in our evidence to the Committee and we feel they are pretty good estimates. Whilst we may be out by one or two, we are not going to be out by 100, you are wrong there.

  97. The cycle for getting something to completion is?
  (Mr Chilton) Six or seven years.

  98. How much of that process is the building of the plant once you have got permission?
  (Mr Chilton) About three years. I am talking about even before you get to build. If we look at some examples. If you look at the Hampshire development process for those incinerators, that has been on the go for five or six years. Surrey has got many more years to go, I am sure, before they finalise their proposals. If we look at the Belvedere plant on the River Thames, that has been in development since 1990. These things tend to take a very long time.

  99. Can I ask about the relationship between recycling and incineration. If the recycling targets in Waste Strategy 2000 are exceeded, and I note that my own borough council has gone from nought to 25 per cent from a standing start in about three years which would seem to indicate quite a lot can be achieved, and the evidence from Enviros is that targets up to 50 per cent are achievable, it is beyond that that there is some debate about how difficult the targets are to get to, to what extent does that undermine the significant increases in energy from waste capacity? If we are getting towards 50 per cent, which has been achieved elsewhere in the world, what does that do to the case for energy from waste?
  (Mr Chilton) I do not think it affects it at all. Energy from waste targets post-recycled waste, it targets that waste which is left over when recycling has taken place. If we look at a modern tender for a waste disposal service and take Surrey as an example: Surrey County Council were very specific that the waste disposal tenderer had to meet 25 per cent recycling, rising to 35 per cent over a ten year period in line with the waste strategy, it had to meet landfill diversion targets and waste to energy just played a part in that system, taking that waste that could not be recycled. There is no conflict there. I think we have to remember that in the UK we started from very low rates of both recycling and waste to energy. The key driver for all of us is to divert waste from landfill. Not everyone agrees that we should do that but the Landfill Directive is telling us that we must divert from landfill, so that is a given. I think the real issue for all of us is that we halt the growth in waste arisings. If we take Surrey County Council again as an example: in a 25 year contract we expect a doubling of waste arisings but there is no problem associated with filling facilities, the problem is producing those facilities in the first place to take care of this tidal wave of waste that keeps coming towards us. It really is a crisis. We feel a little bit like the band on the deck of the Titanic at times. This is a really important issue and we should not be arguing between recycling and waste to energy, the two are absolutely complementary and we need expansion of both in order to meet our targets.

2   Written Evidence has been printed in HC 903-II, page 88. Back