TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2000

MR STEPHEN TINDALE AND MR MARK STRUTT

  339. Can I welcome you to the final session this morning and can I ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please?
  (Mr Tindale) My name is Stephen Tindale. I am the Policy Director at Greenpeace UK.
  (Mr Strutt) I am Mark Strutt. I am a Toxics Campaigner for Greenpeace.

  340. Are you happy for us to go straight to questions?
  (Mr Tindale) That is fine, yes.

  341. Do you think the waste strategy marks the step change which has been suggested is needed to deliver sustainable waste management?
  (Mr Tindale) I think the waste strategy illustrates a welcome increase in the commitment to waste reduction and recycling. Where we do not think it is a step change, and where a step change is still needed, is in the attitude to incineration, which we regard as having no place in sustainable waste management.

  342. Which is a pretty big lacuna, in the waste strategy, is it not, because most of it drives people in the direction of incineration?
  (Mr Tindale) There is some dispute about the extent to which people have been driven, but, yes, there certainly are aspects of the waste strategy which will lead to an increase in incineration, which we regard as completely unacceptable.

  343. To follow on from my colleague, I understand that Greenpeace's main objection to incineration is basically the health risk it poses, but you also go on to say: "allowing incineration undermines the Government's professed desire to increase waste reduction, reuse and recycling." Could you tell the Committee, upon what evidence do you base your opposition to incineration, as part of a strategy for waste management?
  (Mr Tindale) I will talk about the issue of undercutting recycling and then I will hand over to my colleague, Mark, to talk about the health effects. If a local authority enters into a long-term contract with an incinerator, as has happened, for example, with the North London local authorities, they have then, effectively, contracted to supply their waste, they have no financial incentive to increase their recycling rates, and indeed they have a financial disincentive, in that it would be expensive for them to do so. So there is a kind of, if you like, commonsense explanation as to why the North London boroughs have extremely low rates of recycling, even lower than the national rate. And there is a second point, which is that, if funds, under, for example, PFI schemes or Government grants or Government expenditure on waste management, go into the construction of new incinerators, then it is obviously not available for the recycling infrastructure, which, as the previous witness suggested, is what is urgently needed.
  (Mr Strutt) Can I just also add to that. I think, if you look at authorities that have easy access to incinerators, you will be hard-pushed to find one that has an above-average level of recycling; and it is not just in the UK, it is certainly a European phenomenon, as Ludwig Kramer, who is the Head of the European Commission's Waste Unit, pointed out, that wherever you build new incinerators you are going to stifle new forms of waste-handling. So that was his experience for the whole of Europe; and I think the same applies to the UK. The health effects from incinerators are chronic effects, they are long-term effects, and those sorts of effects, as you will be aware, are notoriously difficult to pin down to a particular source. Our concern on the health effects from incinerators is based on two groups of evidence. Firstly, the types of pollutants that come out of incinerators, there is no question of the toxicity of many of the pollutants that come out of them, many of the metals, lead, cadmium, mercury, for example, particulate matter, especially very fine particles, PM10s and smaller, have well-known health effects on the respiratory system, certain types of cancers associated with them, dioxin also; so those, and many others that are actually of unknown toxicity that are produced by combustion processes. So the types of chemicals have known toxic effects. Despite the fact that it is very difficult to pin particular health effects that may take many years to appear to a particular industrial source, there is an increasing number of studies, and now there are quite a few, that have actually done that. So, for example, this year, in the International Journal of Epidemiology, a study pointed out that children within five kilometres of incinerators in the UK were twice as likely to die of cancer. That is one of a growing number of studies.

  344. Yes, but those were actually a much earlier generation of incinerators, were they not?
  (Mr Strutt) Of course.

  345. And that is the problem, that new incinerators, certainly in one or two European cities, have extremely low emission rates. Now are you confident that they have health problems if they are properly managed?
  (Mr Strutt) I am confident that they will have some impact on both local and wider populations. The types of pollutants coming out of the so-called new generation of incinerators are exactly the same as those that came out of the so-called old generation. Our methods used to monitor what exactly is coming out of new incinerators are far from telling the whole story, we believe, and a new generation of incinerators will undoubtedly add to the general environmental burden of the very same pollutants that have been shown to cause these health problems.

  346. Why are you saying there is no distinction between the old generation and the new; and is there no way a process can be devised with the new incinerators to prevent these particulates being emitted?
  (Mr Tindale) There is a difference, in that new incinerators have got rid of some of the toxic emissions from the stacks, nobody is denying that, but there are some categories of pollutant for which there is no known abatement technology. For example, the ultra-fine particles, which are the ones that are most damaging to human health, in that they get deepest into the lungs, and the human body is least well designed to expel them, the abatement technology on new incinerators does nothing to reduce ultra-fine particle emissions; similarly, with emissions of mercury, which is very difficult to abate because it does not bind to other things in the gases. So there are still very dangerous gases coming out of even the most modern incinerator. And the other point to make is that if you scrub pollutants out of the flue-gas they do not disappear, they simply emerge from the incinerator in the form of the fly-ash, and they go to landfill and then eventually are dispersed into the environment that way.

  347. So are you saying to the Committee that you are of the opinion, or you have evidence, that even new incinerators are operating in breach of the emission standards?
  (Mr Tindale) No, we are not saying that they are breaching the standards, although some may be; what we are saying is that the standards are not set on the basis of protecting human health, they are set on the basis of what is technically feasible.

  348. And you have reached that conclusion on the basis of one article?
  (Mr Tindale) No; we have here a report, which I will leave with Mr Yardley, which looks at all the epidemiological evidence, from incinerators primarily in Europe and in North America, but there are some from Asia as well.

  349. Which is new evidence and which is prepared, but you commissioned it?
  (Mr Tindale) It is not new in that it is a review of the literature, but it is, we think, a helpful bringing together of all the evidence.

  350. So it is not true that what you have done is extrapolate from what you think happens in the process of combustion and produced results which are based very much on preconceived views?
  (Mr Tindale) No, it is not true at all.
  (Mr Strutt) There is a compilation of peer-reviewed scientific literature on the subject of health effects.

  Mrs Dunwoody: Yes; well, one would want to examine it very carefully before we took a judgement on that.

  351. I hope you can help me, because I imagine your handle on the science is rather better than mine. But, assuming that the waste stream that goes in for disposal, if it gets incinerated, presumably it simply speeds up the process in the incineration, the chemical process, by which the nasties inside the waste then reform in either dioxins or the particulates that then come out in the fly-ash or the gas flues, if you recycle that stuff in some other way, or you dispose of it in another way by landfill, you are still having to deal with the nasties that are produced often in the process of manufacture, say, in plastics. Is it clear that incineration actually produces any worse outcome than, say, landfill, or some other forms of recycling where these products then go back into the environment, where gradually these nasties are going to leach out anyway, in some form, and would not incineration perhaps destroy a greater proportion than some of these other methods of disposal, or does it create more nasties?
  (Mr Tindale) It creates more nasties. There are some things, like dioxins and nitrogen oxides, which are a product of combustion, which are added to the cocktail of toxic pollutants which are already existing in the waste stream.

  352. Is the science clear on which side this falls down?
  (Mr Strutt) The science is clear, although science is not clear on exactly what is produced in an incinerator. Many of the substances that are produced are known to science, many more are not known to science. What you put into an incinerator does, to a degree, determine what comes out, so if you get lead coming out of the stack it is because you are putting lead into the waste. And I think any sustainable waste management strategy has to look at the type of hazardous materials that products are being made from also. But I think the point you are asking about is that incineration, as a combustion process, causes chemical reactions to happen from the material which is going in, and, as well as emitting toxic materials that are already in waste, those chemical reactions do create new toxic materials that you do not get from other forms of handling the waste.

  353. But if you are reprocessing plastic separately you also get some quite nasty, or you can have a potential to get some quite nasty emissions from reprocessing plastic, do you not?
  (Mr Strutt) There is the potential there, certainly. If you have a material that contains hazardous substances then there is very little you can do to avoid that hazardous substance being recycled or in nature. The flip side of the coin is to look at what products are made of also.

  354. Going on from there, could I ask you if you object to incineration completely; there should not be any incinerator in the land?
  (Mr Strutt) Of municipal waste, yes.

  355. So you are not against all incinerators?
  (Mr Strutt) We are against combustion, as far as is technically possible, yes.
  (Mr Tindale) We are not against crematoria, for example.

  356. I should hope not; but clinical waste?
  (Mr Tindale) And we are not against the combustion of biomass to generate electricity; but clinical waste is an example of current practice which is not the safest way of dealing with clinical waste.

  357. So which is the safest way?
  (Mr Tindale) Clinical waste needs, first of all, to be separated, like any other waste, so that stuff which is simply the paper towels and the newspapers from the wards, all of which is classified as clinical waste and bundled up, at the moment,—

  358. Come on, we are on about the nasties, at the moment, collected and disposed of by incineration?
  (Mr Tindale) The nasties need to be dealt with either through microwaving or through super steam-heating, to make sure that all the pathogens are killed and then they can be disposed of; simply incinerating them does not deal with a lot of the problems.

  359. But, in some respects, apparently, CJD variants are not, by super steam-cleaning, removed, the pathogens, they are not removed?
  (Mr Tindale) Our evidence is that either microwaving or super steam-cleaning is a better way of destroying pathogens than incinerating. The specific point about CJD, I do not know the answer to, and I will write to the Committee, if you would like.