How to Avoid Another Plaster on a Wooden Leg

HOW TO AVOID ANOTHER PLASTER ON A WOODEN LEG PUBLIC INQUIRY TESTMONY Exhibition Hall Kingsley Village Penhale Fraddon MARCH-APRIL-MAY 2010 Town and Country Planning Act 1990 Appeal by SITA CORNWALL LTD against the decision of the former Cornwall County Council (now Cornwall Council) to refuse Planning Permission for the erection of an Energy-from-Waste plant and ancillary development, including a bottom ash facility, bulking up facility, chimney stack, administrative and visitor facilities, gatehouse and weighbridge, vehicle efuelling area, cooling units, parking and circulation areas, security fencing, drainage and landscape woks, pipework for heat transfer to existing china clay dryers, and other ancillary works, togetther with site access road, private haul road and bridged river crossing, junctions with the existing public highway and diversion of footpath at Rostowrack Farm and land at Wheal Remfry, and Goosevean and Parkadillick dryers, Saint Dennis, Saint Austell Cornwall (Cf. Procedural Note : 14 JANUARY 2010 APPEAL REF : APP/D0840/A/09/2113075) RESEARCHER : PAUL MATTHEWS courriel : [email protected] CERC - PREAMBLE TO A HEAVY METAL AND DIOXIN READERS DIGEST “It is a popular misconception that the weight and volume of the raw waste are reduced during incineration. It is often quoted that the volume of waste is reduced by about 90% during incineration. Even if only the residual ashes are considered, however, the actual figure is closer to 45%. The weight of waste is supposedly reduced to about one third during incineration. However this once again refers only to ashes and ignores other incineration emissions in the form of gases, which result in an increased output in weight. In sum, if the mass of all the outputs from an incinerator, including the gaseous outputs, are added together, then the output will exceed the waste input” Greenpeace Laboratories University of Exeter 2001 [1]. The above extract from a twenty-first century report would have made sense to Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794). One of the founding fathers of modern chemistry [2], he correctly identified the composition of water, established the law of the conservation of mass, demonstrated the indestructibility of matter and was the first to explain satisfactorily combustion in terms of oxidation. An example being the production of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, when carbon is ignited : C+O2 = CO2 . He would probably turn in his grave were he to witness the allegedly economic and scientific arguments advanced today to justify what was at one time called “thermal” treatment then, just as euphemistically, “Energy from Waste” or “Waste to Energy” ie techniques employed to process commercially an estimated 17% of municipal waste in the European Union in 2004 and which rely essentially on subterfuge to gain public acceptance, since they are as problematical in the long and medium term as the landfill sites they were supposed to replace. The say-so of experts, with their questionable industrial credentials making them increasingly hostile to the natural world, is pivotal to what passes for sound science and state-of-the-art technology today. Its cornerstone is a novel kind of intellectual dishonesty which, protective of the acquisitive instinct and of the consumer society, dissembles before the enquiring and truly inquisitive mind. It masquerades as independence of thought whilst partaking of an iniquitous value system which engineers consensus, requires an uncritical belief in artificial intelligence and a blind faith in would-be innovative but highly technical answers to problems, whose best solutions as we shall see, are ultimately political and social. To develop adequate understanding of the Appellant's proposals and to consider their full potential in terms of pollution, environmental, health and social costs, the inquiry needs to examine established and emerging policies, putting them into context against a background of geographical and historical data relevant to the gestation of what has come to be dubbed Cornwall's Waste Management Crisis. CERC - EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - LE MYTHE PURIFICATEUR DU FEU “No man is an island ...” First line of English poet John Donne's Meditation XVII. The aim of this carefully researched and documented testimony is to dispel abiding fictions underpinning the credo of so-called Energy from Waste facilities. Notably the political culture which produces all the hot air and sales talk in the first place. Whether using mass-burn incineration or fluidised bed technologies, combustion-led waste management is unsafe, unsustainable and provides neither recycling nor recovery as ordinary mortals would normally understand the expressions. Moreover the modern EfW incinerator provides no alternative to the waste tip, as if one option somehow displaced the need for the other. A disproportionately lucrative sector of the private economy, the waste industry would be out of business without landfills and other infrastructure developments, heavily subsidised by taxpayers, to accommodate incinerator bottom ash disposal, plus a reliance on capital intensive movements of discards and sites to absorb concentrates of fly and boiler ash, bag house filter dust, effluent and residual wastes. The same 'creative accountancy' methods, which has brought banks and financial institutions into such disrepute, allows the public via the European Investment Bank (EIB) to underwrite exhorbitant and dubious Waste PFI contracts such as one engineered by SITA UK and a previous incarnation of the Waste Planning Authority whom shall be henceforth termed, more accurately, the Waste Disposal Authority (WDA). The Appellant is a former subsidiary of Suez Lyonnaise des Eaux, which at the flourish of a pen and some additional hyper activity on the stock market disappeared to be reborn as Suez Environnement in July 2008 ie one of the two main ramifications of a corporate merger that created GDF Suez, France. This company is the world's second largest utilities conglomerate with a 260 000 strong workforce, reported revenues of over $130 billon USD in 2007 and a total net income estimated in the region of EUR 3.6 billion [3]. Given the degree to which national sovereignty has been eroded by a globalised financial economy, with legislative rules of engagement determined not so much by New County Hall, Whitehall or Westminster, as by lobbyists in Brussels, and by international 'think tanks' like the World Trade Organisation and the World Health Organisation, this means referring to the way SITA Cornwall Ltd operates as an affilate of SITA UK ie of the tentacular Suez Environnement, active throughout Britain and elsewhere, notably in Europe. The long and the short of what this submission will be demonstrating was revealed by the outcome of the Cornwall Waste Local Plan inquiry in 2002. Namely that the UK planning system which came into existence in 1947 now treats the public - ie the very people it was intended to serve - as a mere hindrance. It desperately needs an overhaul, and not just the odd of tweaking to a fundamentally flawed Waste Local Plan which is all that HM Inspectorate seemed empowered to propose in 2002. Where the following draft testimony exceeds the 1500 word limit, an oral synthesis will be provided, with, time permitting, detailed reference to the key areas of research in the presentation of proofs of evidence at the inquiry hearings. ________________________________________ [1] Incineration and Human Health : State of Knowledge of the Impacts of Waste Incinerators on Human Health Michelle Allsop, Pat Costner and Paul Johnston. Greenpeace Research Laboratories March 2001. Any acknowledgement for this particularly well researched document needs to be far extended beyond the three authors themselves and their duly accredited advisers and proof readers : Wytze van de Naald of Greenpeace International and Mark Strutt of Greenpeace UK, Andy Moore of Britain's Community Recycling Network – as well as Alan Watson, of Public Interest Consultants Gower, Wales and Dr C Vyvyan Howard of Liverpool and Ulster Universities and who have both further distinguished themselves with their recent work on respirable aerosols. (Cf. An Bord Pleanála, Statement of Evidence, Particulate Emissions and Health, Proposed Ringaskiddy Waste-to- Energy Facility June 2009. Cf. Also Nanotechnology and nanoparticulate toxicity, a case for precaution, published in Nanotechnology: Risk, Ethics and Law, Editors Hunt and Mehta, Earthscan pp 154-166. ISBN 1-84407-358-0). Mention should also be made for example of Greenpeace International's groundbreaking 76 page report «Playing with Fire» edited in 1999 by Lisa Finaldi in collaboration with Pat Costner and Joe Thornton. Civil society salutes the courage of so many of the victims and campaigners speaking out to provide a living and breathing indictment of the endless commercial violence which destroys so many lives in the name of profit and progress. People like Billee Shoecraft, Bob McCray, Lois Gibbs, Marilyn Leinster, Carol von Strum, Val Barton, Alan Dalton, plus Dominique Frey and Pierre Trolliet, co-présidents of ACALP in France, where le mythe purificateur du feu and industrial hubris take their toll. It behoves us moreover to acknowledge the pioneering work of Rachel Carson and the many others who came later to blaze the trail on hormone disruption along with WWF scientist Theo Colborn co-author - with Dianne Dumanowski, John Peterson Myers - of Our Stolen Future. One's mindful of the twenty-one signatories of the Wingspead

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