HC Deb 20 July 1998 vol 316 cc885-92

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Dowd.]

10.14 pm
Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay)

I am grateful for this opportunity to bring before the House the subject of waste disposal in Essex. I have requested this debate in order to discuss waste disposal in, but not by, Essex. Essex disposes of its waste in its own backyard, but the problems experienced in my constituency are caused largely by other counties disposing of their waste in Essex. I believe that they should process it in their own backyards.

My constituency is situated in the south-east corner of Essex. It is the most heavily populated part of the county, and is situated on the north side of the Thames roughly 30 miles from London. It faces across the river to Kent. It is very close to the Dartford crossing, which is part of the M25 ring road and one of the most heavily trafficked areas in the country. For centuries, gravel and sand has been extracted from the river bed along the Thames estuary. That has left many large holes in the ground that are used mostly as landfill sites—although the Lakeside shopping centre is situated in one of them. That shopping centre has parking spaces for 12,000 cars, so one can appreciate the size of the hole.

There is a large waste fill site in Pitsea in my constituency. Others are located in the constituency represented by the hon. Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay), who is in his place, and in the delightfully named Mucking flats. Mucking flats is actually in the constituency of Basildon, but it used to be in my constituency, and, because it has such a wonderful name, I have become particularly fond of it, and often mention it in the House.

My main concern is that the county of Kent, which is perfectly able to dispose of its own rubbish, has refused to open and use new landfill sites. It has twice refused to install incinerators in the county, and has chosen instead to move more rubbish across the Dartford crossing and deposit it in landfill sites in Essex. It already exports half a million tonnes of waste a year to Essex, and its present proposals would double that quantity.

As a result, there would be an additional 200 heavy goods vehicle movements a day on the Dartford crossing. If one adds up those movements during a year, one sees how much traffic that decision would generate in my constituency and in that of the hon. Member for Thurrock. By 2010, Kent will have no more landfill space, so it will want to export an additional 1.5 million tonnes of waste to surrounding counties.

Most of that rubbish could be processed easily within Kent—if not by landfill then by incineration, as I shall explain later. One can imagine the effect that large numbers of lorries would have on my county, which is already heavily industrialised. Shell Haven is located in Essex, and there are many oil transporter movements. Tilbury docks is situated nearby, and large container lorries move backwards and forwards in the area. We could well do without the extra traffic.

A proposal for a waste from energy incinerator in the Erith and Crayford area of Kent was turned down by Kent county council on the ground that the facility was not needed. That means that the waste will be transported across the river and dumped in my part of the world. Brian Griffiths, the director of Biffa waste—a major waste servicing company—said: It is not acceptable that Essex should have to bear the cost of Kent's failure to provide for landfill. This is part of a dangerous trend for waste problems to be shunted from one community to another. The next problem we have is London, which produces 8 million tonnes of domestic and commercial waste every year. Most of that goes to surrounding counties, including Bedfordshire, but a great deal of it comes down the road into my part of Essex. Over 17,000 tonnes of it is transported by river, which is the sensible way to send it, to Mucking flats, where it is used for landfill. At least that keeps it off the road, but that is only a small part—about 20 per cent.—of the rubbish from London, because 80 per cent. comes by road and generates about 1,000 heavy goods vehicle movements in and around the London area each week.

If that is multiplied by the amount of rubbish coming from Kent, the number of extra vehicles on the roads becomes clear. If the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions really wants to tackle the problem of overuse of the roads, he can well start by dealing with the rubbish that is being moved from one county to another when it could easily be dealt with in the counties that produce the rubbish.

As a result of this transfer of rubbish, anyone travelling along the A13 or Al27—the major roads into my constituency—will see in the hedgerows plastic bags, which are blown out of heavy goods vehicles, many of them uncovered, as they return to Kent or London. The wind gets into the back of the lorry and whips up bags that have been stuck in the vehicle. As a result, black bags adorn the verges. We have some of the filthiest verges in the country, and we are not proud of that. One of my constituents said to me recently, "I am ashamed to invite friends to visit me in Essex because of the filthy state of the roadsides." I understand exactly what she means. The heavy goods vehicles leave a trail of plastic bags that we can do without.

London is one of the main culprits in depositing its waste in other people's backyards. Essex county council will not tolerate this for ever. In fact, it is to stop other counties bringing their waste into Essex by 2011, which is not so very many years away. Essex will look after its own problems, but it will not be taking in rubbish from elsewhere, for which it does not have room.

The opportunities for dealing with rubbish within the county that produces it are well discussed. The opportunities are either recycling, which is very fashionable, or composting, which may help with some domestic waste. In Essex, one can obtain a free composting bin. It is handed out gratis from the county council. I suppose that the bin is put outside one's back door and the kitchen waste is shoved into it. However, only a tiny and trivial amount of the rubbish can be dealt with in that way.

There is the fashionable attitude that a great deal of rubbish can be recycled. Essex is very good at providing sites, and there are 23 major recycling sites in the county. I have been to see those involved in recycling, and I have spoken to the people employed at the recycling sites. Although official figures tell us that 40 per cent. of rubbish is recyclable, those at the sites tell me that, in truth, only about 20 per cent. of it ends up in the recycling process.

For example, there is no market for waste paper. It is too expensive to recycle it all by extracting the dyes and reusing it. Although people spend time in their cars travelling to recycling sites to dump waste paper, it ends up in landfill sites in the end. They might as well have put it in the dustbin. Apparently, plastic bottles cannot be recycled because there are many different kinds of plastic and it is too expensive to sort them. As a result, they end up in a landfill site.

Although we do our best in Essex to recycle rubbish, that is not the answer. It is an environmentally friendly approach, but it is not the solution.

Richard Sandbrook is a veteran "green", and was once a director of, or some prominent official in, I think, Friends of the Earth. He is now the director of the London-based independent research group, the International Institute for Environment and Development—goodness gracious me, what a title. He wrote an article recently that appeared in the New Scientist. It reads: Much thinking on recycling is fundamentally flawed because environmentalists refuse to countenance any argument that undermines their sacred cow. Richard Sandbrook says that truck movements transporting recyclables and domestic waste and the car journeys of individual households going to and from the recycling site emit large amounts of the very substances which most people who object to incineration object to—carbon dioxide and all sorts of other bits and pieces. According to his research, they generate as much pollution as anything that is done to incinerate rubbish.

Another gentleman, Matthew Leach, who is an energy policy analyst and a lecturer in environmental technology at Imperial college, wrote a good article in New Scientist in November. He said: In terms of fossil fuel used to supply one tonne of paper in the UK, virgin paper accounts for roughly half as much energy as recycled paper. Both pieces of research undermine the idea that recycling is the answer to all our prayers.

Mr. Bob Russell (Colchester)

The previous Conservative Government had national targets for recycled materials. Will the hon. Lady accept from me that collecting recyclable materials from the doorstep, as the council does in Colchester, is the way forward, and that we must recycle more materials? I was with her 100 per cent. when she criticised London and Kent, but I am parting company with her now.

Mrs. Gorman

The hon. Gentleman restates the common perception that recycling can solve this problem, but experts are telling us that it cannot, and that it is a bit of a dream that we can recycle everything. The usual target is 40 per cent., so, by definition, 60 per cent. is not recycled. When we come down to it, only about 20 per cent. is recycled. I had that from the environmental officer in charge of recycling for Essex county council, and I am giving hon. Members his words, not mine.

Incineration is the bugbear. The two incineration plants in London cause no problems in their locality. The plant in Deptford has some of the latest technology, which was installed in 1994, and has no more effect on the community than would an ordinary factory with a chimney. It does not cause great trouble for the local people, there is not a "not in my backyard" attitude towards it, and it produces a genuinely useful product.

The plant caters for Lewisham, Greenwich and other parts of south-east London; material comes from the streets nearby, so long-distance travel is not involved, and it produces electricity and heat energy. The waste product from the incineration is recycled—metals are extracted—and the ash that is left is used in building blocks, which are used for insulating houses, in tarmacking roads or for forming layers in landfill sites so that raw waste is bedded down.

That is an environmentally friendly and useful way of carrying on. There are about 10 of those plants in the country—for example, in Nottingham, Middlesbrough, Dudley and the Tildasley area of Birmingham. There are also several in Sheffield. The technology has been developed in France, where it is extremely widely used by a company called Vivende. Its British offshoot is the south-east London combined heat and power consortium.

The process is tried and tested, and the recycling unit is not a vast factory with a horrible chimney. Although I have never decided to do it, I am assured that a person could sit on the top of the chimney, breathe what comes out and not be damaged. I do not know whether one would last long enough to come down and tell the world about it.

The main problem that people raise is that of dioxins. Those are chemical substances which, allegedly, are not filtered out. In a paper on dioxins and incineration, a leading authority, Professor Andrew Porteous of the Open university, says: The risk from living near an incinerator is put at 7 in 10 million, something akin to being struck by lightning. He says that the dioxin release is extremely low—he gives the figure in nanograms, which most of us would not understand. To put it in context, he says that it is the equivalent of throwing a quarter of a sugar cube into Loch Ness. He obviously means to imply that an extremely small risk is involved, once the mechanism for recycling in modern units is understood.

The Government must balance the demand of the environmental lobbyists, with the best will in the world—Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace—against the damage that is done by carting rubbish all over the country, in terms not just of the filthy exhaust fumes produced by the lorries, but the fact that they clutter up the roads. The environmentalists cannot have it both ways. If they are against the amount of traffic on the roads, they should welcome incineration and dealing with rubbish on site.

My constituents are fed up to the back teeth with juggernauts trundling down country lanes on their way to landfill sites. They no longer want to tolerate that. In 10 or 12 years' time, we will not tolerate it. By that time, both London and Kent will have to deal with the problem in their own back yards.

10.32 pm
Mr. Andrew Mackinlay (Thurrock)

I shall be brief, because the Minister wants to reply to the debate. I thank the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) for allowing me to speak in her debate. She has mentioned many places in my constituency, so it is incumbent on me to make some comments.

First, I wholly agree with the hon. Lady about the need to stop the importation of waste into the county borough of Thurrock and the county of Essex from other areas. It is intolerable. My constituency is like a moonscape, having been exploited over many, many decades, and it is time that the exploitation of that part of Essex stopped.

Secondly, although I sign up to the Government's strategy for the Thames gateway, I have some reservations. If the Thames corridor is to be built up, it is legitimate to ask where all the human and household waste will go. The Thames gateway strategy must not be considered in isolation.

My third point is on incineration. The benefits of exploiting new technologies are not incompatible with the need for a recycling strategy. The two are inextricably linked and complementary.

I realise that those on the Treasury Bench are anxious about the raising of matters in my constituency, so my final point is that the Government have an opportunity to have strong green credentials if they make the tipping of waste—landfill—very expensive, as other European countries have, and knock back the rapacious appetite of the aggregates industry, which wants to dig holes and exploit minerals, particularly in the south of Essex. That area has been exploited intolerably for too many decades.

I hope that the Minister will feel able to say that the Government are prepared to say no to the exploitation of my part of Essex, to outline a bold recycling strategy, to use technologies to minimise waste, and to stop the importation of waste from other local authority areas that do not meet their obligations.

10.33 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Angela Eagle)

I have only about nine minutes to try to deal with these complex questions.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Billericay (Mrs. Gorman) on securing the debate. She clearly believes in slaughtering sacred cows: she did so on global warming the other day, and she is doing it again on recycling. I do not accept her pessimistic view that 20 per cent. is the maximum that can be attained by recycling. I have visited places where much higher levels are achieved. We must decide what is the best environmental option.

I have considerable empathy with the issues that the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Mr. Mackinlay) have outlined. Essex faces a problem that is common to the south-east of England. Existing landfills, on which the area is heavily reliant, are filling up quickly, suitable new sites are in short supply, and the large landfill site at Mucking will reach the end of its planned life by the end of 2001. That has a significant effect on established patterns of waste disposal.

Established patterns of waste disposal will be affected by the changes identified in our strategy document "Less Waste; More Value". One such change is the landfill directive, which we are currently negotiating with our European partners. It has two main thrusts. In addition to its welcome regulatory aspects, which should ensure a high standard of landfill engineering and management across the European Union, it will set progressively diminishing limits on the landfill of biodegradable municipal waste, down to a maximum of 35 per cent. of the total amount of such waste produced in 1995 by the end of 2020.

Perhaps that is a European directive which the hon. Lady can support. It will ensure that we consider other ways of disposing of waste. Essex has a particular problem because of its closeness to London, where many tonnes of waste are produced.

Those measures will require developments in the treating of wastes by reduction at source, recycling, composting or incineration with energy recovery, which are all in the waste disposal hierarchy. We must plan for the introduction of new technologies and new infrastructures, which will enable us to make progress in meeting what are likely to be stringent targets under European Union directives.

I appreciate the hon. Lady's concerns about the planning advice issued by the London planning advisory committee on waste management and its possible impact on Essex. I stress that that is not a Government proposal, and that its status is advisory. The hon. Lady will know that the plan, on which there have been consultations, proposes a moratorium on the building of new incinerators. It also suggests a high level of recycling—40 per cent. for London's waste, whereas currently only about 8 per cent. is recycled. The plan is very ambitious, and it still has to be discussed by the London boroughs and the outlying areas.

We are considering the advice of the London planning advisory committee, and we shall respond in detail shortly. We have no fundamental difficulty with the aim of the guidance to minimise the amount of waste produced and to increase recycling, but we share the concerns to which the hon. Lady alluded and which have been expressed by my hon. Friends the Members for Harlow (Mr. Rammell) and for Braintree (Mr. Hurst) about how the proposed ambitious recycling targets, which form the basis of the advice, will be met, and, crucially, what will happen if they are not met.

The London planning advisory committee has proposed a moratorium on all but small capacity incineration. The Government believe that high levels of energy from waste and recycling are compatible, and that they each have their place in the hierarchy of waste disposal. It should be possible for local authorities and other waste producers to ensure that their contracts with energy-from-waste plants allow for successful waste minimisation strategies.

I visited SELCHP, and was impressed by the way in which the project was brought to fruition and the local community was brought on board—a member of the local community sits on the board. It has made a good start, and it is not worried or upset by the idea that London boroughs may be able to achieve high levels of recycling. It believes that that is compatible with its process of incinerating whatever cannot be recycled.

However, as the hon. Lady said, we must consider the environmental effects of all the lorries that trundle around London taking waste to incinerators or landfill tips. I suspect that we must also consider the fact that the River Thames flows to the sea in order to establish what best use can be made of it. At present, waste flows down the Thames on barges to the Mucking landfill site—although that will stop when the site is filled up.

I recognise Essex county council's concern that London should take responsibility for a greater proportion for its waste, and the need to move away from its current reliance on landfill. I do not think that anyone would argue with that analysis; it is simply a question of how we get there from where we are now in the time available, and that will obviously take time. We are concerned about the development of an integrated strategic approach to waste management in the capital, given the split into 33 London boroughs that was introduced by the last Administration. That fractured the planning, and made it much more difficult for issues of this kind to be dealt with on a strategic basis.

The creation of the Greater London authority is designed to tackle a fragmented and confusing picture. First and foremost, London needs a proper municipal waste strategy, which the new mayor for London will be required to produce. The mayor will be required to develop an integrated municipal waste management strategy for London. In drawing up the plan, he or she will need to have regard to the principles of sustainable development, and the best practicable environmental option.

Such an option must take account of the fact that lorries may be carrying waste around, and of other strategies involving transport, air quality and economic development. He or she will have to consult all bodies affected, including authorities such as Essex and others surrounding London. The mayor will have to take account of the national waste strategy, and the boroughs' waste recycling plans; he or she will also have the power of direction over any non-compliant boroughs. In short, counties such as Essex will be consulted by the mayor as proposals are developed.

In the meantime, I remain concerned that decisions should not be made that close down options for the Greater London authority. There are two concerns. First, the final waste plans of neighbouring areas such as Essex must recognise a continuing need for some landfill outside the capital for treated waste. The GLA will obviously need sufficient time to consider the issue, and to develop its own waste strategy. We would be interested to hear from Essex county council what flexibility there is in its future plans to assist that.

Secondly, we want proper consideration of the issue of river-borne waste transfer. The Thames currently provides an important route for the transport of the capital's waste, keeping some 500 heavy lorry movements a day off London's congested streets. The Government would like to get even more waste off the roads.

"Less Waste; More Value" makes it clear that we are concerned about the risk of increased waste transport. Local authorities should think carefully about the full range of the implications of their decisions on waste—not just the cost and not just the direct impact of waste disposal on the environment, but factors such as emissions resulting from the transport of waste.

I understand that the hon. Member for Billericay and the other Essex Members have been invited by the county council to a briefing meeting on waste issues in Essex, to be held in two days' time. The meeting is designed to discuss the issues raised tonight: the Essex waste plan, the county council's responsibilities and strategies for managing household waste—including increasing recycling and composting—and the continuation of options for limiting future waste imports into Essex from areas such as London and Kent. I urge the hon. Lady to use that occasion to make clear her thoughts on the issue to those responsible for waste management in Essex, as she has made her thoughts clear to the House tonight.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at seventeen minutes to Eleven o'clock.