New Petitions
Incineration (Green Alternatives) (PE1379)
Under agenda item 2, we have two new petitions to consider. We will take oral evidence on the first one, which is PE1379, from Michael Gallagher, on green alternatives to incineration in Scotland. I welcome Michael Gallagher to the meeting. He is accompanied by Professor Paul Connett, from St Lawrence University in the USA, and Ann Coleman from the UK Without Incineration Network, who is attending in place of Shlomo Dowen. One of you may make an opening statement of no more than three minutes, after which I will invite members to ask questions.
Michael Gallagher (Green Alternatives to Incineration in Scotland)
Burning 1 tonne of waste represents the emission of up to 5 tonnes of CO2—3 tonnes from making the products in our rubbish and up to 2 tonnes from burning it. Incineration recovers a tenth of the energy that is used to make the products in our rubbish.
In Invergordon, the Scottish Government—especially its appeals directorate—ruled that incineration undoubtedly pollutes and
“should not be seen as a long term solution in the move towards zero waste.”
Despite that, in its new so-called zero waste plan, the Scottish Government says that we should burn around a quarter of our waste, because we will be able to recycle only 70 per cent by 2025, which is 15 years away. Is that really the best that we can do?
It definitely is not. Over the past year, South Oxfordshire District Council has doubled recycling to 73 per cent. In 2008, commercial waste recycler Binn Skips was already recycling 75 per cent; I believe that since then it has upped the figure considerably. Lancashire County Council aims to recycle 88 per cent by 2020 and has rejected incineration outright, because of the long-term cost. San Francisco is recycling 77 per cent and aims for 100 per cent recycling by 2020.
Why does the Scottish Government say that the best for which we can hope is 70 per cent recycling by 2025? Basically, it is saying that Scots are too feckless to recycle properly. That is the triumph of despair over hope.
That despair is now being felt by communities all over Scotland who are desperately fighting against proposals for large incinerators on their doorstep. Let us take Invergordon as an example. For two years, the community fought fiercely against proposals for a large waste incinerator. There was real fear among local people about emissions. One resident said:
“At times it has been hellish thinking about being half a mile downwind from an incinerator that would belch toxic fumes at us.”
Local people were overjoyed when the council eventually refused planning consent, but their joy was short lived. The company managed to overturn the decision by appealing to the Scottish Government. The community was devastated and felt powerless to do anything. By chance, however, Mohamed Al Fayed owned the neighbouring land, and he challenged the Government in court. The Government quickly caved in.
Not all communities are so lucky. In 2006, almost a third of the population of Abernethy wrote individual letters of objection to a proposal for an incinerator. The council ignored them and gave planning consent. A local man told me yesterday:
“I moved to Abernethy from Manchester following ill health, never realising that I would have to share my retirement with a huge incinerator. Despite the usual ‘corporate’ assurances I am not confident that my future health and wellbeing will not be affected by this proposal.”
I have provided further quotations from residents—I do not know whether committee members have received a copy.
Yes, we have.
Right. I have provided further quotations from other residents of Abernethy to show you how such a proposal turns people’s lives upside down and how the worry makes people absolutely miserable. Few communities have billionaires like Mohamed Al Fayed to stand up for them. That is why we are asking you today for your help.
I would also like to tell you a little more about my colleagues who support the petition. On my right is Professor Paul Connett, who is regarded by many as the leading authority in the world on alternative methods of waste treatment to incineration and on some of the real health issues surrounding waste incineration. On my left is Ann Coleman, a long-standing community activist who for many years and as part of her local community has had to fight against problems with local landfill and latterly with proposals for a colossal waste incinerator—I think that it would deal with 350,000 tonnes a year, which is five or six times more than the current largest incinerator in Scotland deals with. Therefore, Ann has first-hand experience of how powerless ordinary people feel in the face of such proposals.
Thank you. Do members have any questions?
Good afternoon, colleagues. I state first that I am very sympathetic to the petition. In a former existence as a city councillor in Glasgow, I was part of a campaign to prevent an incinerator from being established on greenfield in Glasgow’s east end. However, today I had better stick to questions, and I will try to be devil’s advocate—although we are not creating any saints today.
Mr Gallagher talked about health dangers. Sometimes we hear from proponents of incinerators that health dangers can be minimised or even dealt with entirely. I ask Professor Connett: is there any evidence to suggest that there is such a thing as completely safe incineration?
16:15
Professor Paul Connett (St Lawrence University)
No, there is no evidence of that. The problem is that you need three things to protect the public: strong regulations; adequate monitoring; and aggressive enforcement of the standards when they are violated. If either the second or the third thing is weak, the first—the strong regulations—does not protect you.
The monitoring of dioxins, for example, is totally inadequate. They are measured twice a year and the company knows when the inspector is coming to take the measurements. Usually, three six-hour tests are carried out in 24 hours. A probe is put in and a sample is collected for six hours. After that has been done twice in a year, there are 36 hours of ideal data. The machines have to be working properly when the measurement is taken; if they go off spec, the measurement is stopped. So 36 hours of ideal data is extrapolated to 8,000 hours of operation. To compound the problem of the inadequacy of such monitoring, they take an average of those numbers whereas they should take the measurement at a 95 per cent upper confidence interval, which, if there is any variation in the data, will be higher than the highest number measured.
I got into the field 26 years ago as a chemist. I taught environmental chemistry at St Lawrence University. I have now retired. My speciality was environmental chemistry and eventually shifted to environmental chemistry and toxicology. I remember being shocked by dioxins 25 years ago. I knew of dioxins from Agent Orange and had no idea at that time that you could make the same horrendously toxic substances simply by burning household trash. At the time, the main concern was about the cancer risks from inhalation. We argued 25 years ago that that would not be the greatest risk—the greatest risk would be the impact on the food chains. We and others did the calculations. It is staggering that in one day a grazing cow collects in its body the equivalent of 14 years of breathing dioxin. The impact on the food chain is a massive issue.
For a long time, that has been the issue. I do not deny for a moment that modern incinerators in Germany and other countries are doing a much better job. They have probably lowered the dioxin emissions by at least a factor of 100, and maybe by a factor of 1,000. However, our understanding of the toxicology of dioxin has increased comparably. Now, we are probably 10 times more concerned about the fact that it interferes with foetal development. In a nutshell, the issue with that is this: you cannot convert dioxin into a water-soluble substance and then excrete it through the kidneys, so it accumulates in the fat. A man can never get rid of it, but a woman has a way to get rid of it—it is called having a baby. The dioxin that she has accumulated in her fat for 20 to 30 years moves to the foetus in the nine months of its life and then to the baby through breastfeeding. The result is that the foetus—the most fragile human being—is being impacted by a substance that is known to interfere with hormonal development. It screws up hormones, which are intrinsically important for foetal and infant development, particularly for brain, mental and sexual development, as well as the development of the immune system. As I said, I think that the industry is making progress in this area.
The other issue that has reared its ugly head in the past few years involves the new subject of nanotoxicology, which has developed because of the introduction of nanotechnology. Some bright person asked whether, if we are going to use nanoparticles in everything from shaving cream to tennis rackets, there are any health problems associated with them. The answer that came back was devastating—nanoparticles are so tiny that they go straight through the lung membrane and into every tissue in the body, including the brain. It is not that nanoparticles are new; they come from any high-temperature combustion—from coal-fired power stations, wood burning, coal burning and so on. The difference with the nanoparticles from incinerators is that inevitably they will contain the most toxic elements that we use in commerce. If we use toxic metals such as lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic, they will end up in those nanoparticles and have the potential to enter our body.
I am sure that Michael Gallagher will make available to you—if he does not, I can certainly do so—the 33-page paper from Professor Vyvyan Howard, who I have known for many years and who is a foetal-infant pathologist who worked formerly at the University of Liverpool and is now in Northern Ireland. He gave testimony in an incinerator hearing in Ringaskiddy on nanoparticles. The paper is the most brilliant, up-to-date summary of the issue from someone who I consider to be one of the brightest people I know. He wrote a book on ultrafine particles in 1999 and simply updated the review of the literature.
What we need from Governments, particularly regulatory agencies, who are telling the public, as the United Kingdom Government is doing, that incineration poses no health threat, is a scientific rebuttal that goes through all the evidence that Vyvyan Howard has produced, so that we can all be confident that his concerns, which are my concerns, are recognised, observed and, if possible, rejected. I have not seen that done. I did not see it done with the paper that appeared in the environmental health prospectus in June 2006—I forget the name of the person who wrote it, but I can get it to you. I said the same thing in 2006: somebody from the industry or Government has to respond to the issues that are being raised in the paper, because they are very serious.
At the end of the day, after all the dust has settled on the dangers of incineration, even if you made incineration safe, by collecting all the air emissions, finding a satisfactory way of dealing with and capturing the very toxic fly ash and the bottom ash that are produced—overall, one quarter of the waste that goes into an incinerator comes out as this ash, 10 per cent of it fly ash and 90 per cent of it bottom ash—and ensuring that the regulations were tight enough and that you had adequate scientific monitoring, which we do not have, and aggressive enforcement, it still would not be sensible. It simply does not make sense to spend so much money destroying resources that we should be sharing with the future.
With the transition from the 20th to the 21st century, the pendulum has swung from a concern—an obsession—with toxicity to a much larger, more subtle concern about sustainability. As Michael Gallagher rightly pointed out, when you burn trash, you are wasting energy. To call these plants waste-to-energy plants is completely Orwellian; they are a waste of energy. When you burn something, you have to go all the way back to the beginning and start the whole process of extraction, manufacture, shipment and so on all over again. Neither incinerators nor landfills are sustainable. I would love at some time to talk about what the alternatives are.
That was very illuminating, professor. I have learned much from what you said, especially about nanotoxicology. I was involved to some extent in the campaign in Glasgow in the mid-1990s. Thank you very much.
I thank the petitioners for waiting so long. I do not think that it has ever taken us quite this long to get to the second petition on our agenda. I had better declare an interest, particularly for the professor’s benefit: I am a chemical engineer by first profession, but that seems a little while back. I am very grateful for your comments.
I am reflecting on the laws of thermodynamics, not in relation to the power station effect, which is of no consequence in the current environment, but simply because comments were made earlier about how much could be recycled—the figure of 70-something per cent was used, but let us not fight about the something. How much of what is currently domestic waste could be recycled? I rather imagine that for one reason or another it is not 100 per cent, because you can never really reach 100 per cent. Will you address that issue?
Absolutely; it is a very good question. I would say that, right now, 85 to 90 per cent of it could be reused, recycled or composted. The zero waste issue comes in when we get to the question of what to do with the residuals, which is always the show-stopper. There might be agreement on recycling, composting and reuse, but it is when we have to decide what to do with the residuals that the incinerator industry rushes in to fill the void.
What we are saying about zero waste is that once we reach the point at which the community has maximised recycling, composting, reuse and so on, instead of making the residuals disappear, we should make them highly visible, because that forces the emphasis to shift. Then, the message to industry from the community is that if people cannot reuse, recycle or compost products, industry should not be making them. We need better industrial design for the 21st century. Zero waste is about understanding the issue as a design problem, not just a disposal problem.
In practical terms, how do we achieve that miracle? The answer is that after we have done our recycling, reuse and composting and put in place waste reduction initiatives and economic incentives and so on, we build in front of the landfill not an incinerator to take the ash, but a residual separation and research facility, and use some of the huge amount of money that is being frittered away on incineration to integrate the issue with higher education. That would involve getting our professors, engineers and students who are interested in sustainability to study our mistakes. They would use the facility as a laboratory. A zero waste research institute is already operating in Capannori in Italy, which is coming up with designs to eliminate some of the things that are in there. There are many other steps that can be taken.
This goes a little beyond your question, but I hope that you will forgive me if I talk about the tragedy of what is happening in the UK, compared with what is happening in the United States. I started in 1985. In the United States, between 1985 and 1995, more than 300 incinerators were stopped. Since 1995, virtually no new incinerators have been permitted. A few old ones have been expanded and there are always a lot of people on the edges trying to build gasifying pyrolysis plants and so on, but the industry is virtually dead as far as movement forward is concerned. If we contrast that with the position here, we find that the UK is a pincushion of incinerator proposals—they are everywhere. I think that The Independent said that there are 80 such proposals, 16 of which are in Scotland. Those plants could cost anything from £0.25 billion to £1 billion over their lifetime, so we are talking about a vast amount of money.
Why is that? Why the tragedy? It relates to the landfill tax. There might have been a good intention behind it, but the tax, which is escalating by £8 a tonne, is a surcharge. As well as paying whatever the waste company wants for the landfill, it is necessary to pay the Government £48 a tonne—that is this year’s rate. The reason why that is a tragedy is that that £48 a tonne is not being used to do anything to do with waste management. It is going straight into the central Exchequer; there is no come-back. We need to drive the process in the right direction, because the end result is that the waste hierarchy is being driven tortuously from the bottom up, from the very worst option, which is landfill, to the next worst option—use of incinerators—at enormous cost. You are moving up the hierarchy, instead of moving downwards from waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting. We could do that, and I hope that you will pass that message on to your colleagues in Westminster. You could do it. That is what I said to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and it is what I said in a meeting at the House of Commons. You need to have a surcharge and rebate system so that the money from the bad options—the landfill tax surcharge and surcharges on bottom ash and fly ash—go to central Government, which should give rebates.
Let me give some figures off the top of my head—although you would need an economist to work this out. The system should be fiscally neutral. The money that comes into central Government should go back to communities so that they can do the right thing. There could be a £48-a-tonne surcharge, as there is right now, for landfilling, with a £12-a-tonne rebate for every tonne that is recycled, a £24-a-tonne rebate for every tonne that is composted, a £36-a-tonne rebate for every tonne that is reused and a £48-a-tonne rebate for every tonne that it can be demonstrated has been reduced. That would drive the system from the top downwards.
The system could be tweaked even further by having economic incentives at the local level. The simplest system, which is the one that is working in San Francisco, has one container for compostables, one container for recyclables and one container for residuals. People pay. There could be a rebate per pound of compostables and recyclables and a system for the residuals. Every individual would have an economic incentive to do the right thing and the Government would be working together with citizens on the matter, just by tweaking the system. We have seen what a disaster the wrong tweaking has been, but the right tweaking could get our system in place.
16:30
I am grateful to you for putting that on the record and I am sure that your comments will be listened to or at least read by people who should be thinking about the issue.
I will address a serious technical issue, which is what we as a society do with really difficult chemicals. You mentioned dioxins, which are produced by burning stuff—let us not worry about what that stuff is—and you go on to nanoparticles, which is useful because nanoparticles were not known and were not created until during our lifetime or possibly our adulthood, but suddenly they are there and people are using them. First, if they are being developed and used in commercial chemistry—if I may create that phrase—and are, in fact, creating a waste problem, which I think they are, how will we stop people using them?
Secondly, given that those kinds of horrid chemicals are out there now, how will the waste business deal with them, because they are there, they are not going to go away and we have to do something with them? If we cannot incinerate them and cannot put them in concrete blocks and bury them—forgive me for trivialising the other end of the physical solution—how are we to deal with difficult chemicals? Might not the best thing that we can do with them be to incinerate them in the very best plants that we have, scrub the tail as best we possibly can and live with the fact that although a little bit gets out, at least we are dealing with them?
That is another excellent question. Is incineration the way to go? Absolutely not, because you will produce nanoparticles from the burning process itself—plastics and paper do not have any nanoparticles in them, but the tennis rackets and what have you do, and will also release nanoparticles. Therefore, in terms of releasing these things, the last thing that you want to do is incineration. That is why the research component is crucial and it is necessary to get our professors at universities who are interested in sustainability, chemistry and chemical engineering involved in this early, because these are the kind of questions that should have been raised—it is always easy to be wise after the event—before we spewed these things all over the planet.
We will have the same problem with genetically engineered foods. Once they are all over the place, we will wake up, just as we woke up when polychlorinated biphenyls—PCBs—were everywhere and in the fat of every human being. Perfluorinated organic compounds are now ending up in the fat of every human being. We need to get up front with these things.
I am not suggesting for one moment that it will be easy to deal with the problem, which has been created. The legacy is always a problem. There may be a rational programme to deal with today’s problems going forward, but we are hampered by the problem of what the hell we do with the legacy of things that we should never have made in the first place. That is much more difficult.
For the bulky items that contain these nanoparticles, we have to ask: what happens when we recycle these materials—plastics, solids, ceramics or whatever? Will the recycling process release the nanoparticles? If that is the case, we have a problem; if not, maybe we can recycle them. But that question must be answered. If we cannot recycle them, we will have to go back to storage—landfill, though a different kind of landfill.
I have always maintained that the problem with landfills is not what engineers have always assumed it to be—controlling what comes out. That is because all landfills leak, irrespective of how toxic the material is. The important thing is to control what goes into the landfill, which is why even before we get to research, a residual separation facility is important.
The key issue is whether we are secure in the knowledge that the solids—for some reason, I have fixed in my mind a tennis racket that nobody will use again because it is cracked or something—can be put in a hole in the ground. For example, could it be put in a quarry? If we know that it is really inert material that will not leach out with rainwater or melting snow, we just have to find a receptacle for the material in the same way as if it were brick, ceramics or something like that. What we do with materials depends very much on what kind of materials they are, but I very much doubt that burning them is the best option.
Are there any further questions?
Yes. Sorry, I have a bit of a cold. You mentioned a tennis racket, Professor Connett. I have a tennis racket that has been broken for about 12 years and I do not know what to do with it, so I am just keeping it—for absolutely no reason.
My question arises from a response that you gave to Bill Butler. He asked whether there was any safe way of incinerating and you said no. You said that that was because of the way in which we monitor and enforce regulations—or do not do so, as the case may be, which I think is what you were arguing. I was going to ask whether we should therefore tackle the monitoring and enforcement of regulations, but I think that you answered that when you said that, even if we monitor and enforce regulations properly, there is no sense in spending so much money on incineration. You said that incineration plants cost between £0.25 billion and £1 billion. Does that mean that it is actually cheaper to tackle recycling and that the financial costs to our country will be less if we do not incinerate?
Absolutely. Study after study has shown that a combination of recycling, composting and source separation is far cheaper. You just have to look at the technology to know that, at least from the capital cost point of view, that has got to be cheaper. Half the money that is spent on a modern incinerator is spent on the air pollution control devices, and the better they are, the more toxic the ashes are, which must then be got rid of. It therefore stands to reason that the capital costs of composting, recycling, reuse and anaerobic digestion facilities will be cheaper.
The difference is in where the money goes. The alternative solutions are labour intensive, so they create far more jobs. If we build an incinerator, most of the money goes into capital equipment and much of it will leave the country because many of the technologies come from Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, France and so on. That creates very few jobs. The alternative solutions mean that most of the money works twice: it not only gets us the waste solution, but creates local jobs and stimulates local business, particularly with reuse and repair, which is tremendous—there are many examples of that. On my web page, americanhealthstudies.org, you will find a series of videos on zero waste around the world. I have not had time to make any recently, but those that are there feature very exciting reuse and repair facilities from Australia, California, Canada and Vermont in the United States.
Our task in the 21st century is not to get better and better at destroying things but to stop making things that have to be destroyed—that is the real issue. Again, it comes back to the design issue. Incineration is a sophisticated answer to the wrong question. We are just trying to get more and more sophisticated at doing something that is totally inappropriate for the 21st century. As I said at the beginning, it should be all about sustainability. Every human being in Scotland makes waste, but as long as we are making waste we are part of a non-sustainable way of living on this planet. The beauty of a zero waste programme is that if we start to do all the things that are included in the 10 steps to zero waste—source separation, door-to-door collection, composting, recycling, reuse and repair, waste reduction initiatives, economic incentives such as the pay-as-you-throw system, residual screening and provision of research facilities, biological stabilisation of the dirty organic fraction and interim landfill—we will not only involve our people in solving the waste problem, but open up consciousness of what we need to do to move towards sustainability.
For many people, sustainability is a big word that is far removed from their lives. It is for professors and politicians who are running for President; the average person does not really understand it. However, they understand their children. If we say that their children’s future is being limited by the number of toxics that we are leaving in different parts of the planet and because we are using up their resources, they understand that. Everyone understands waste. If we add in the economic incentives, it could be really exciting. If we did not have a waste crisis, we would need to invent one to have the tool to move our civilisation forward.
We are sleepwalking; we are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to. If everyone consumed like an American, we would need four planets. If everyone consumed like a European, we would need two planets. That is the status quo. Meanwhile, India and China are copying our consumption patterns. We have not seen anything yet. We must wait for all of that Chinese and Indian production and consumption to hit our planet. We must do something different and set a better example. This is the place to start.
For me, it is a tragedy to waste £8 billion—or whatever it is—on incineration. That is a huge waste that takes us no closer to sustainability and does not create much energy. There is also the problem of worrying about the toxics. Incineration is politically unacceptable. I have been to England, so I know that wherever it is proposed there people are up in arms and furious, as they do not want it—it is the most unpopular technology since nuclear power. We are creating political problems, are not moving towards sustainability and are leaving a legacy of ash; incineration also costs a fortune. There are many other options that create jobs and local businesses and move us towards sustainability.
I am conscious that Ann Coleman has not yet had much of a say. Given that she has had direct experience of the issue, it might be useful for us to hear her views. I am conscious of the time—we can probably spend another five or 10 minutes on the petition.
I will try to keep my question brief. I thank Michael Gallagher for keeping me in the loop on green alternatives to incineration and Professor Connett for his contribution so far. I apologise to Ann Coleman for the fact that my question is directed to Professor Connett.
Ann Coleman (United Kingdom Without Incineration Network)
That is fine.
We have an election in just over four months’ time. If you were given the chance to address the new Government, what would be the principal win-wins that you would use to entice it towards a zero waste policy or, at least, adopting a non-incineration policy?
Professor Connett’s interventions have been fascinating, but I ask him to be brief. I am conscious that there are many more petitions for us to consider and that we had a long session at the start.
I will be very quick. First, the new Government will be impressed when MSPs with constituents who are fighting incinerators tell it that supporting incineration is unpopular politically and will not get it any political miles. Secondly, incineration is expensive and is not healthy for the Scottish economy. Thirdly, there is an elegant solution. I cannot see a flaw in my suggestion to you that the landfill tax surcharge be replaced by tax and rebates, to drive the hierarchy from the top downwards. The proposal is simple, is economically sound and can be fiscally neutral. People will jump at that.
16:45
I would like to make the point that under the landfill tax, there is an environmental fund that the communities that live closest to a landfill site can access, but no such fund was put in for incineration, which is 10 times worse. Ironically, communities benefit more from landfill than they do from incineration.
Yes, that seems perverse.
I welcome the panel to the meeting. I live not far from Ann Coleman as the crow flies and I know the problems that have been faced at Greengairs and the new problems that the current proposals would give rise to.
My question is for Michael Gallagher and Ann Coleman. In the petition, you indicated that there are 16 proposals for large-scale burners.
The figure is now 17.
How many of those proposals are for local authority incinerators, how many are for joint partnership incinerators and how many are for private incinerators?
All incinerators end up being built by private operators, but there are differences in the degree to which a partnership with local authorities is involved. Up until now, with most of the incinerators that have been built, the emphasis has been on partnerships with local authorities, but more recently there has been a different emphasis in one or two cases. For example, the big new incinerator at Newton Mearns is to be a purely private affair—it has been stated publicly that there is no intention to target municipal waste.
As far as cost is concerned, as I said earlier, Lancashire County Council has rejected incineration altogether because it is extremely worried about the long-term costs of being tied into long contracts that, typically, last for 20 years. It has taken a long-term view and realised that if it started to do very well at recycling, it would not have enough waste to meet its contractual commitments to the incineration company and would end up facing penalty clauses. That is one reason why Lancashire County Council has rejected incineration and gone for the high recycling rate option instead, which it has estimated will probably cost about half as much as the incineration option.
I have a point to add on the costs. Whether an incinerator is built by a private company or by a municipality, the economics are that it is paid for by the tipping fee, which is the amount that municipalities and citizens have to pay to get rid of a tonne of waste. As Michael Gallagher said, a contract is involved. It is usually a put-or-pay contract that involves a municipality signing a line that says that it will produce, say, 200,000 tonnes of waste a year at such-and-such a cost. If it does not deliver those 200,000 tonnes, it will have to pay for that anyway.
I think that when a lot of people hear about these gigantic waste-to-energy machines, they are misled into thinking that we are talking about a power station, and that the relevant corporation has a trick of taking people’s waste, making electricity and selling it for a profit. That is not the case. The profit from incineration comes from the tipping fee. The electricity and heat that are produced offset the costs—they reduce the tipping fee, if you like—but the profit comes from the tipping fee, not from the sale of electricity. All incinerators depend on municipalities signing contracts that tie their hands for 20 years, at least.
As there are no further questions, I invite suggestions on what we should do with the petition.
Having heard the witnesses, I think that we should continue the petition. Serious issues have been raised. We should write to the Scottish Government to ask it whether its zero waste plan and the progressive landfill ban mean that more waste incinerators will be required. We could also ask for its response to the health concerns that arise from the incineration of waste. We could write to Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency to ask them for their views on the issues that the petition raises.
There are other issues; that is why I asked my earlier question about how the plants will be built and maintained. We should ask the Scottish Government to indicate the current level of monitoring of airborne contaminants at incinerators and to describe the process for building monitoring into any future incinerators. Other members of the committee have indicated their involvement in incinerator campaigns. My first involvement in such a campaign was in central Scotland more than 31 years ago.
You must have been very young.
I was a very young councillor at the time. It was very difficult to get the local authority to shut down the plant once it was operating, despite all the evidence of emissions from the plant that was becoming available. It is about how we monitor plants and who monitors them. Planning authorities are mainly responsible for monitoring emissions from municipal waste; at the same time, local authorities are contracting with contractors to deliver a service. It is important that monitoring procedures are laid out clearly, to indicate who carries out monitoring.
It is also relevant for us to ask a range of local authorities for their opinion on the petition and the issues that it raises, which concern local authorities such as Glasgow City Council, Scottish Borders Council and Aberdeenshire Council. Because Ann Coleman is here today, I am tempted to throw in North Lanarkshire Council, which is considering three or four planning applications for incinerators at the moment.
I have two suggestions. First, Ann Coleman spoke about the community fund that is accessible to people who have a landfill nearby but not to those who live near an incinerator. It is worth our asking the Scottish Government why that is the case and whether it will consider doing something about the issue.
Secondly, Professor Connett spoke about a report—I will get this wrong—on the effect of dioxins and nanoparticles on foetal development. He said that there has been no scientific rebuttal of the report. I am not sure whether we should write to the Scottish Government or the British Government about that. I suggest that we find out who we should write to and ask why they do not feel the need to rebut the report scientifically, as I would be interested to know their reasons. The point relates to a question that Bill Butler has already asked. We should write to whoever ought to respond to the report to ask them to do so.
I return to the suggestion that we write to SEPA and anyone else who is relevant about monitoring. There are two completely different issues, so we must ensure that they understand them when we put our questions. The first, to which Professor Connett referred, is the impurity levels when a plant is running properly. That is a genuine question that needs to be checked; if it is not, we will not know how a plant operates. The second issue is the level of monitoring at 2 o’clock at night, when no one knows what is going on, and at 2 o’clock in the afternoon—in other words, the on-going checking of how well a plant is being run. That is a very different question, to which the answer will probably be very different.
A range of questions have been suggested. Some can be put at the Scottish level and some should probably be directed to the UK Government. Of course, the regulations that relate to emissions emanate largely from the European level.
It is suggested that we seek an update on the progress and success of initiatives for reuse, recycling and waste reduction. We get recycling figures fairly regularly, but we hear little about programmes for the reuse and reduction of waste. Can we ask whether the Government can point to any specific figures on progress on reuse and waste reduction?
Obviously, we have been given information about systems of subsidies and incentives, but it would be useful to ask the United Kingdom Government whether there are any plans to consider such things. So, we will continue the petition. I thank the petitioners very much for attending today and for waiting patiently.
In our petition, we ask the Scottish Parliament to support three specific proposals. At what point will the Public Petitions Committee decide whether it will encourage the Parliament to support our three proposals, to which many people have signed up?
The committee will ask the Government a series of questions, including questions on your specific suggestions. When we get a response from the Government, the committee will decide how to take the petition forward. I encourage you to keep in touch at all stages with the clerk to the committee, who will be happy to answer any questions that you have.
I have a question that goes beyond this particular discussion. I notice that you have on the agenda PE1358, on the use of sodium fluoride and calcium fluoride. I could be a resource there. I have spent nearly 26 years on waste management and for the past 15 years I have been opposed to fluoridated drinking water—water fluoridation. I have written a book called “The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There”. I mention this because I am staying in the house of one of the co-authors, Professor Spedding Micklem, an emeritus professor from the University of Edinburgh, who would—
That is potentially very helpful. I encourage you to get in touch with Fergus Cochrane regarding that very helpful suggestion.
I would be happy to. I will try to get a book to you guys.
Thank you very much indeed for attending today and for your patience.
Football Tickets (Prohibition of Resale) (PE1380)
The next new petition is PE1380 by Andrew Page, on prohibiting the resale of football tickets. What are members’ views on how to take the petition forward?
This is a serious issue and we should continue the petition. We could write to the Scottish Government to ask for its views on the issues that are raised in the petition, why it has not taken the steps that the petitioner advocated previously and whether it would be willing to take the action requested by the petitioner. We could also write to the SFA and the SPL to ask for their views on the issue and whether they have any measures in place that prevent the resale of tickets for more than their original face value.
Does the committee agree to continue the petition and take the suggested steps?
Members indicated agreement.