Jean Lambert, the Green party’s Member of the European Parliament for London, has joined a protest against the proposed incinerator in Beddington.
Local residents and campaigners join Jean Lambert MEP at Beddington this week
Visiting a primary school next to the proposed incinerator site on Friday, Lambert contradicted Croydon Central MP Gavin Barwell’s assertion that the Beddington Lane incinerator is safe for health.
Adopting a convenient line that ignorance is bliss, Barwell has told residents expressing concern about the health risks of setting fire to waste downwind of Croydon that, “I am not aware of any scientific evidence that modern energy from waste plants of this sort pose a risk to human health.”
Lambert says that is not the case – there is indeed evidence of health risks caused by the industrial burning of millions of tons of rubbish from across south London and southern England. “There is an issue of very fine particulates,” Lambert said.
The nano particles accumulating in our lungs and those of our children cause Lambert great concern. “There is a growing body of evidence from the World Health Organisation that those small particulates do actually have a health effect,” Lambert said.
It is not known whether Barwell is “aware” of the World Health Organisation.
Voters may be nervous of accepting the Conservative MP’s reassurances about the lack of health risks arising from the new incinerator after local Tories’s promises to “oppose any incinerator being built in Croydon or on the border of Sutton” before the elections in 2010, which was broken by 2011.
For Lambert, incinerator schemes being built in densely populated residential areas is too great a risk for public health. “The evidence is beginning to stack up that the accumulation of those very, very small particulates in the air really can damage your health,” Lambert said.
Even the volume of traffic, with heavy lorries bringing the tons of rubbish to the site for burning, is expected to have a damaging impact on local roads and those who live nearby.
The full interview with Lambert can be heard on Andrew Pelling’s Croydon Matters programme on Croydon Radio at 3pm next Sunday, February 17.
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