No Incinerator in Bristol

Lead petitioner : Paul Harrod, Charlie Bolton, Jeremy Birch

Status: New > Draft > Rejected > Accepted > Collecting signatures > Awaiting submission > Submitted > Pending owner response > Closed > Withdrawn

Status: Closed

Petition

We call upon the Administration of Bristol City Council and its partners to cancel plans for a mass burn incinerator, and to adopt more sustainable solutions for dealing with the city's residual waste.

Background information

1. We oppose the use of Mass Burn Incineration(*) for dealing with the West of England's residual waste.

2. We should adopt an immediate recycling target of 50%, with 70% in the longer term, and work towards a genuine zero waste strategy. We should be segregating more of our recyclables on the doorstep, to ensure we get good quality raw materials for recycling. Collected mixed waste should then be sorted to recover the maximum remaining recyclable material.

3. We should reduce waste miles.

4. Waste disposal facilities should be small-scale, and sited as close as possible to where waste is being created.

5. Waste disposal methods should be chosen in order to minimise our climate change impacts.


Incineration...
1. Encourages more waste.
Incinerators need fixed quantities of rubbish. Authorities that have chosen incineration, have correspondingly low recycling rates. Contracts also tend to be very long (25 years), meaning that we will have no way to adapt positively to changes in the waste make-up and volume.

2. Generates energy inefficiently.
Incinerators that generate electricity produce more greenhouse gases than gas fired power stations. We are very unlikely to get a CHP incinerator which would operate at 50-70% efficiency. The market is more likely to want to build an electricity-only incinerator, which will operate at around 27% efficiency. Incineration does not generate renewable energy - burning plastic just substitutes one fossil fuel for another.

3. Wastes energy
Recycling saves far more energy than is generated by burning waste because it means making fewer new things from raw materials.

4. Causes pollution
Smoke, gases and ash from incinerators can contain harmful dioxins which are a cause of cancer. There are also a lot of heavy metals left in the ash.

5. Does not make waste go away.
Incineration reduces waste to around 40% by weight, 25% by volume. Much of the ash needs to be disposed of to hazardous landfill.

* The West of England Joint Residual Municipal Waste Strategy recommends that we build an "Energy from Waste" plant to process our residual waste from 2015 onwards. The Strategy defines "Energy from Waste" as "Energy that is recovered by thermally treating i.e. incinerating waste". However, the term "Energy from Waste" has been used misleadingly in this context, as it can actually cover a multitude of different technologies, where it is not necessarily tied to incineration. Also, incinerators can be small scale, but the plant proposed for the West of England, would have a minimum capacity of 160,000 tonnes p.a. We think, therefore, that a more honest description of what is proposed for the West of England is "mass burn incineration".

Signature Count

365