An open letter on behalf of local council partners in response to an MP’s criticism of a planned household waste incinerator has attacked “scaremongering” and warned of abandoning the project “at this very late stage”.
The letter was sent to Redcar MP Anna Turley by Denise McGuckin, the managing director of Hartlepool Council, which is leading the procurement process for the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TVERF) due to be sited at Grangetown on land forming part of the Teesworks complex.
Mrs Turley recently posted online in opposition to the £300m scheme and warned of the area being a “dumping ground for rubbish”. She wrote to Hartlepool and Redcar and Cleveland Councils – the latter having granted planning permission for the TVERF in 2023 – to call for a pause to the plans which would place an “unfair burden” on an area already facing significant challenges.
Mrs McGuckin’s letter said: “The partner authorities each have a statutory duty to safely manage thousands of tonnes of residual waste produced each day in our respective regions and this is one of the most essential day-to-day functions of any council.
“In this context, any solution for meeting this statutory obligation must, as priority considerations, be safe, reliable, sustainable and affordable. The TVERF project is the only solution with the potential to meet all of these criteria, subject to the outcome of the procurement process.”
It also explained: “Central to our long-term waste management strategy is to decrease overall waste volumes; increase recycling rates and send as little as possible to landfill. But even under the most ambitious future recycling and waste-reduction scenarios, there will still be a significant proportion of residual waste to manage over the lifetime of the TVERF project and into the foreseeable future.”
Anna Turley
(Image: Jack Taylor/Getty Images)
The letter addressed new requirements in respect of new energy from waste plants announced by the Government last month and said, with full planning permission having been acquired and an environmental permit granted by the Environment Agency last August, it had been factored into Defra calculations as “consented capacity”.
It said: “The Defra capacity study also refers to the Government’s target of achieving a national average residual waste volume of 287kg per person per annum by 2042 – which is approximately a 50% reduction on current levels.
“This means that, even with dramatically increased recycling rates locally by 2042, and without making an allowance for increased overall waste volumes associated with population growth, the partner authorities can still expect to have to treat more than 400,000 tonnes of residual waste each year through energy recovery, or landfill.”
Addressing environmental concerns, the letter said: “Regarding day-to-day operations, energy from waste facilities are among the most highly regulated industrial installations in Europe and must meet strict conditions regarding emissions, odours and a range of other factors. They are subject to constant monitoring and often operate at just a fraction of permitted emissions levels with no detrimental impact on air quality.”
The TVERF would also be combined heat and power enabled, thereby potentially allowing export of low-carbon heat from the facility to surrounding users in future, the Government having outlined that facilities must show how they can best make use of the heat they produce.
The letter acknowledged several energy from waste facilities were operating on Teesside already, including at Haverton Hill, Billingham, and Wilton, Redcar, but “safely and largely anonymously for many years now with no individual or cumulative negative impact on local air quality, health or amenity”.
It claimed anti-incineration campaigners were “scaremongering” with local activism “designed to undermine confidence in a vital, mature, proven technology we all rely on, both now and in the future”, and generating unnecessary concern within communities.
It said: “Recycling and energy-recovery are both necessary and complementary components of a circular economy. Although some other emerging technologies exist to treat residual waste – all through various forms of thermal treatment) – none meet all of the criteria of being safe, reliable, sustainable and affordable.”
The project was described as regenerating a disused industrial brownfield site at Teesworks, which had good transport network links, good access to electricity grid infrastructure and was ideally situated to develop carbon capture and storage infrastructure should the opportunity become available.
The letter concluded: “To abandon the project at this very late stage would not only expose the councils to significant abortive costs in the short term, but will also leave the councils hostage to fortune with respect to service costs and meeting their statutory waste management obligations in future.”
Seven councils – Redcar and Cleveland, Hartlepool, Middlesbrough and Stockton, along with Darlington, Durham County, and Newcastle City councils – have to date committed to the proposed plant, which could be operational in 2029 and process up to 450,000 tonnes of household rubbish a year, generating almost 50,000 megawatts of electricity for the National Grid.
Two firms, Viridor and Green Recovery Projects Limited have been shortlisted to operate the facility with a decision on the successful tenderer expected later this year.
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