Government policy will drive approval for more municipal waste incinerators, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Last June, in their Agreed Programme for Government, Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats explicitly opposed "mass-burn incineration, with no energy recovery" as a waste management option. As far as they were concerned, it was "not an acceptable practice today." The curious thing is that nobody had actually proposed the "thermal treatment" of municipal waste without extracting energy from it. What would be the point of burning tens of thousands of tonnes of municipal waste if there was no payback in terms of generating electricity or fuelling a district heating scheme?
Fianna Fáil, which hadn't a single word to say about incineration in its election manifesto last May, went along with the PD line that thermal treatment using the best available technology "must be based on prior extraction from the waste stream of recyclables and problematic materials" like metals and batteries.
Incineration has been on the Department of the Environment's agenda for years. It is justified on the basis that burning waste (with energy recovery, of course) makes more sense than finding new holes in the ground for landfill. Incineration also occupies a higher place than landfill in the EU's waste management "hierarchy".
When local councillors baulked at adopting regional waste management plans, former Minister for the Environment Noel Dempsey rushed through amendments to the Waste Management Act allowing county managers to adopt these plans instead; four of them duly did so within days of the legislation coming into force.
One of the problem areas was the north-east region, comprising Cavan, Monaghan, Louth and Meath. Louth councillors had declined to adopt the regional waste plan, largely because it included provision for thermal treatment, so it was adopted instead by the county manager, John Quinlivan, in an act of executive fiat. That paved the way for Indaver Ireland Ltd, a Belgian-owned company, to put forward its plan for a municipal waste incinerator at Carranstown, near Duleek, Co Meath. It would have a capacity to burn 150,000 tonnes of waste a year, generating enough electricity to serve the needs of towns the size of Drogheda and Navan.
The €85 million project has been bitterly opposed by local residents and the environmental lobby. It generated 4,500 objections to Meath County Council, plus a petition signed by more than 26,000 people and personal appeals to An Bord Pleanála by former taoiseach John Bruton TD and former attorney general John Rogers SC.
No wonder there has been such an angry reaction to the board's decision to approve the project - especially after it emerged that its members had voted by seven to two in favour of rejecting a recommendation for refusal from the planning inspector who dealt with the case and presided at an oral hearing of all the arguments.
Some of the reaction borders on hysteria. CHASE (Cork Harbour Area for a Safe Environment), which is campaigning against Indaver's plan for a hazardous waste incinerator at Ringaskiddy, described the decision as a "death sentence" - citing the recent Health Research Board's study on the public health effects of waste disposal.
CHASE seized on the study's finding that living near an incinerator may cause increased levels of "respiratory morbidity" and then jumped to the conclusion that morbidity equals death. In fact, morbidity means disease - only mortality equals death. And, in any case, the HRB study was so inconclusive that it would be difficult to be definitive.
In making its decision, An Bord Pleanála had regard to the regional waste plan and national waste management strategy as set out in Government statements. Though precluded from considering environmental risks - which are a matter for the Environmental Protection Agency - it saw the project as a "necessary public utility".
The board's cards had been well and truly marked for it by policy statements from successive ministers for the environment. The present Minister, Martin Cullen, is no exception. He has made it clear that he favours a "limited number of state-of-the-art thermal treatment facilities ... licensed to the most up-to-date and stringent standards."
Cullen is so determined to deal with the waste crisis that he has introduced new legislation - the Protection of the Environment Bill 2003 - that would permanently assign the power to adopt waste management plans to county managers and allow local authorities to stop collecting refuse from householders who don't pay charges.
The EPA has already licensed industrial incinerators for Eli Lilly in Kinsale; Novartis and SmithKline Beecham in Ringaskiddy; Swords Laboratories in Cruisrath, Co Dublin; Yamanouchi in Mulhuddart, Co Dublin; Lawter Chemical, Grannagh, Co Kilkenny; and Roche, in Clarecastle, Co Clare. There is no reason to believe Indaver will not be licensed.
Thermal treatment also forms part of the regional waste management plans for Connacht and the south-east, which includes Waterford, the Minister's own constituency. Sites for these facilities have yet to be selected but, as soon as they are, it may be expected that plans will run into the usual NIMBY-driven raft of opposition.
In Britain, nine of the last 14 planning applications for "combustion based technologies" have been rejected on three main grounds: (1) the solution does not represent best practicable environmental option; (2) the need has not been demonstrated in the context of recovery and recycling targets; and (3) the site is not appropriate.
Here, the battle lines are being drawn over Dublin City Council's plans for a thermal treatment plant at Poolbeg, on a site adjoining the upgraded sewage treatment works. A shortlist of tenders for the project is currently being drawn up and will be watched with interest to see whether it will be exclusively confined to "mass burn" solutions.
Last August, the city council sought expressions of interest in the provision of a thermal treatment "waste-to-energy" plant at Poolbeg which would generate energy to fuel the adjoining sewerage works. This would be regarded by engineers involved in the waste management business as a neat solution in environmental terms.
But if mass-burn incineration proposals alone are short-listed, then Dublin will effectively have made its decision. Despite the city's high recycling aspirations, a mass-burn incinerator at Poolbeg would inevitably be viewed as having a voracious appetite for waste, with the attendant need for a landfill site to deposit a lot of ash.
One of the companies competing for the contract is Herhof Environmental, a joint venture involving Treasury Holdings, which has proposed an alternative German process under which all types of recyclables are extracted from municipal waste and what's left is turned into RDF (refuse-derived fuel) to fire cement kilns, for example. The company also wants to build a second waste treatment plant at Courtlough, near Balbriggan. Indeed, given that waste is supposed to be treated as close to source as possible, a case could be made for smaller plants in each of the four Dublin local authority areas so that all the refuse trucks would not have to head for Poolbeg.
Herhof boasts a recycling rate of up to 50 per cent by separating things like ceramics, water, glass, ferrous and non-ferrous metals from the waste stream before composting the residue as RDF. But in order to satisfy the "waste-to-energy" terms of the Dublin tender, it would need to include on-site incineration of RDF at Poolbeg.
Whatever decision is made, it will be politically sensitive. Among those who will feel the heat are the two Government deputies in Dublin South East - the Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell (PD), and Eoin Ryan (FF) - especially as one of their constituency colleagues, the Green Party's John Gormley, is an articulate opponent of incineration.
On Thursday, the Green Party tabled amendments to the Protection of the Environment Bill demanding that the Government adopt a target of achieving "zero waste" by 2015, with a ban on the incineration of waste and new incentives to reduce, re-use and recycle. "Almost anything in the waste stream can be recycled, if the will is there," they said.
Many might regard this as pie in the sky. Yet it is a fact that waste minimisation ranks top of the EU's waste management "hierarchy", even though it gets much less attention, or resources, than disposal. It is also a fact that we're rapidly running out of landfill space. We simply must deal with the mountain of waste that we ourselves are creating.