Incinerator Questions Need Answers

The Breathe Clean Air Group is extremely grateful to Trafford Council for making a High Court challenge to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government’s granting of planning permission to the Barton Renewable Energy Plant (in Davyhulme, Greater Manchester).

In the meantime the Breathe Clean Air Group will be campaigning on the more pressing issue of ill-health impacts caused by incineration of so-called biomass, including the burning of contaminated waste timber, solid recovered fuel such as plastics and old landfill site debris.

The Group will be challenging the Environment Agency that issued an Environmental Permit to Barton Renewable Energy Plant in October 2012. They will be endeavouring to find out why the EA appeared to ignore some of BCAG’s evidence; why the EA accepted Peel Energy’s proposals without checking the facts; why the EA accepted the proposed out-dated technology, even referring to it as “Best Available Techniques” (BAT); and why BREP was allowed to have such a short chimney stack in a densely populated area.

BCAG will also be asking why the EA does not take into consideration the cumulative effect of other sources of air pollution; why the EA has never refused a permit to an incineration process and why the EA no longer carries out unannounced monitoring visits to dirty processes.

Of considerable concern to BCAG is why the Environment Agency takes advice from the Health Protection Agency about the safety of incineration, when the HPA has not carried out sufficient research into the health effects around existing incinerators and particularly infant mortality, child abnormality studies and cancer.

The Breathe Clean Air Group will be asking the Department for Energy and Climate Change why it is pursuing a policy of burning biomass that produces more carbon dioxide greenhouse gas than burning coal. And why it wants to cut down and burn masses of native or imported trees – the very thing that absorbs carbon dioxide.