Imagine buying a house and a few years later the biggest waste incinerator is built just across from your front garden. You then suffer daily the noise of the plant and of the lorries delivering waste. A disgusting smell and foul air engulf your living space. You have to put up with a plague of flies. Entertaining guests in your home is unthinkable. Selling your house and moving on is out of the question as your home is blighted.
“Residents in Runcorn have been living next to the biggest waste incinerator since 2015, suffering noise, foul air, and a plague of flies.”
This has been the experience of working-class people in a deprived area of Runcorn since 2015 when Viridor built the new incinerator. It was proclaimed as a ‘greener’ solution than landfill, which was generating methane gas and costing councils more and more as taxes were imposed. The bonus, according to the local and national government, was that the waste could produce energy.
Polluters often affect the working class more
The 180 or so households that lived next to the plant—some of whom had protested the initial build—took out a civil lawsuit against Viridor. The company settled for a £1 million payout in December 2023. Each household got £4,500 but had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. A few defiant people stood up and refused the payout. They get to speak out in the BBC film. It is difficult to imagine a neighbourhood in the gin and tonic belt in Surrey would ever settle for such a derisory sum. Probably the payout was tax-deductible and scarcely affected their bottom line. You can understand why people in a community with seven food banks saw four and a half grand as a windfall they could not afford to reject.
“These mega incinerators are ten times more likely to be situated in deprived areas than affluent ones.”
According to BBC research, these mega incinerators are ten times more likely to be situated in deprived areas than affluent ones. Over the last decade, 60 such plants have been built and dozens more are planned. Like the carbon capture project financed and talked up by the new Labour government, we are witnessing grotesque greenwashing.
Yes, these incinerators do produce energy, but they also produce carbon—today they are the most carbon-intensive generators of energy. Blast furnaces in places like Teesside are being replaced by these carbon polluters. Protesters against the Enfield incinerator expansion have produced data on the toxic effect of the fine particles produced by the process. Viridor’s claim that it just produces steam is disingenuous to say the least.
Huge incinerators in Runcorn and Teesside take waste from up to 150 miles away. All those lorry journeys create more pollution.
Partnerships for growth are not what they seem
Viridor is another example of a capitalist company whose balance sheet tots up the profits but leaves out the social and environmental costs. Labour is staking its whole dash for growth on partnering with big corporations. However, it is a partnership where the government is very much a junior partner. At the same time, it provides huge bungs—paid out of our taxes—to persuade them to invest here. The government does not even follow the logic of programmes like the Dragons’ Den TV programme where the investors take a share of the company they are putting their money into.
The Runcorn experience also reveals the absolutely toothless approach of the Environmental Agency. Despite the company breaking regulations and residents reporting it to the Agency, nothing much is done. It is the same story with Ofwat, the water industry regulator. How many times has it slammed the water companies for polluting our rivers and seas? But the best it can do is to mete out a few fines that fail to dent the huge payouts shareholders have raked in over the years. Taking these sectors back into common ownership has been completely taken off the agenda by Starmer’s government despite it being very popular and previously Labour policy.
Big business has been very effective through lobbying and lending staff to ministers—even before they got into government—so that a pro-market ideology has been solidly embedded. A friend recounted recently how the pro-Starmer local leader in his General Management meeting declared, “It’s a free market, you can’t do anything about it.” Despite its dismal record at actually doing much about inequality and exploitation, the history of the Labour Party was at least about trying to moderate the consequences of the free market. These days it is no longer even formally social democratic. Social liberal is a much better definition.
What is the alternative?
Today the local people in this part of Runcorn are still suffering the impact of the incinerator. One resident interviewed in this programme made a very pertinent point. He said that with the incinerator people around here see it as a dumping ground. It makes them feel worthless too since they are being dumped on. It all leads to stress and mental illness. No wonder people in such areas despair of any change led by a Labour government and can be attracted by the reactionary populist demagogy of the racist right.
What is the alternative to incinerators? Reduce, recycle and reuse has become a credo of the environmental movement and it applies in this case. Big investment is needed to encourage recycling. We were told by Hackney council that the borough had to support the Enfield incinerator expansion because recycling rates, particularly on large estates, could not be improved. There may be all sorts of imaginative schemes that could be set up which would also create jobs, if the resources were put in.
On a wider level, a Labour government should be regulating business in order to reduce plastic and packaging waste. Built-in obsolescence with electrical goods could be tackled head-on although this requires some international coordination which is more difficult after Brexit. Business could be taxed according to its contribution to waste products. Government could provide money for local projects to get people to reuse or share goods. How many times do you really use that power drill or saw? Of course these solutions challenge the capitalist drive for ever more consumption. Starmer’s capitalist partners do not want to hear that sort of language. This government’s central slogan of growth cuts across sustainable ecological solutions.
In the short term, Labour should investigate the incinerator crisis and at the least compensate local residents (in ‘partnership’ with companies like Viridor?) in a way that allows them to move out to somewhere less polluted.
Dangers of Labour’s deregulation
Just recently, Starmer proclaimed he wanted to “rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment.”
Greenpeace UK’s director of policy Dr Doug Parr correctly criticised this approach when responding to the appointment of Don Curry to a role that would overhaul the regulations in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to ensure they are delivering growth:
“Our natural world supplies incalculable benefits for our health, not to mention the food we eat and vital services such as carbon sequestration and flood management. All of these things bring economic benefits that rarely appear in the spreadsheets of economists in Whitehall and the private sector.
That’s why it’s concerning to see regulations being put in a separate column to ‘economic growth’. Regulations are a last defence for our few remaining wild places, countless species, our seas and waterways, and all of the value they provide to society. Of course Defra is a ‘key economic growth department’ by virtue of its fundamental role as custodian of the riches of the natural world.”
From Guardian live blog, 16th October
We will be discussing these issues with activists across the movement at the Second EcoSocialist Conference on 7th December. Details can be found here.
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