As BBC television news finally catches up with the notion that what’s coming out of the chimneys of incinerators like the one at Beddington Lane might not be entirely wholesome or healthy, we take another look at the infant death rates in areas downwind of these these industrial plants
What’s in that smoke?: the Beddington incinerator was built with its impact on people’s health hardly considered at all
The Beddington Lane incinerator, and other incinerators built since 2003, should never have been opened if the Health Protection Agency had acted with due diligence.
That’s according to independent researcher Michael Ryan, who has been studying official data for the impact on health of those living downwind of waste incinerators’ chimneys.
Last year, this website reported how infant mortality rates in one part of north Croydon, downwind from Beddington’s “energy from waste” plant, increased by more than four times in the first year after Viridor began plying their polluting trade in south London.
The figures were submitted as evidence to a public consultation over whether Viridor should be granted a licence to burn even more rubbish and create even more deadly pollution, while raking in ever greater profits.
“The actual numbers of infant deaths recorded by Office for National Statistics in the first full year after the incinerator started operating is shameful and not to be ignored,” environmental campaigner Jim Duffy warned in his 2023 submission to the Environment Agency.
Duffy asked the EA to commission a full study on the local health impact of the Beddington incinerator, which fired up its furnaces for the first time in 2018 and was fully operational from 2019.
But Duffy’s submission was ignored.
It’s more than 10 years now since Inside Croydon published findings from independent researcher Michael Ryan, using official figures from the ONS, which suggested similar damaging health consequences for those living around incinerators.
Ryan says that his warnings have also been ignored.
“Two eminent medical doctors wrote about my research to residents concerned about my research showing a link between incinerators and infant mortality. I’m named in both doctors’ letters,” Ryan told this website.
“Both Dr Robert Maynard of the Health Protection Agency (in a letter dated August 2008) and Dr (now Sir) Harry Burns, the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland (in a letter dated January 2008) sent replies detailing what the considered to be wrong in my research and saying what needs to be done to demonstrate a link.
“Both these eminent doctors, both in positions of authority, could have carried out what they said I should have done. But they didn’t,” Ryan says.
Ryan is a retired chartered civil engineer and former senior flood defence engineer at the Environment Agency. He believes that two of his children died because of exposure to incinerator emissions.
“Flooding can’t be hidden,” Ryan says, “unlike the adverse health effects of incinerator emissions, which have long been a concern around the country.”
Despite having a statutory obligation under the Environment Act 1995 to assess and take into account possible harm to human health, the EA has continued to issue permits for incinerators. According to Ryan, that is, “Because they’ve never had any accurate advice on the adverse health effects of emissions.”
Critic: Sir Harry Burns, when Scotland’s CMO, dismissed Ryan’s work
Ryan says, “Residents in England and Scotland who were independently concerned at my research which suggested a link between incinerator emissions and infant mortality received letters in 2008 from Dr Robert Maynard, of the Health Protection Agency and Sir Harry Burns, who was the Chief Medical Officer for Scotland from September 2005 to April 2014.
“Their criticisms of my research and ‘what I should have done’ beg the question: Why hadn’t they already done it themselves?”
On August 21, 2008, Dr Maynard wrote: “Simply claiming that infant mortality is higher downwind of incinerators really will not do: you need to show that you have taken into account confounding factors that could also be playing a part.
“You would also need to explain why some wards in the downwind direction do not have higher than expected infant mortality rates, if indeed this is the case.”
Ryan says today: “Dr Maynard overlooked that fact that ONS data show sudden post-incinerator increases in rates of infant mortality in areas exposed to incinerator emissions – a fact that started with the Edmonton incinerator after 1971 and continued with those at Nottingham, Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield, Kirklees, Bolton, Lewisham, Bexley, Shrewsbury, Marshbrook, Colnbrook, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Plymouth, Exeter, Four Ashes, Hartlebury, Crymlyn Burrows and Splott.”
And now Beddington, too. This can’t all be just coincidence, Ryan suggests.
In his letter to a concerned resident, Dr Maynard also wrote: “Colleagues and I have undertaken a literature search in this area: we have failed to find persuasive evidence of your assertions.”
Compare and contrast: Michael Ryan’s figures, showing the difference in infant mortality rates in north London, downwind of the Edmonton incinerator, compared with Bromley for the same period
Ryan, too, has undertaken a literature search in this area, which has included reading research work carried out in Japan 20 years ago, where they examined rates of infant mortality around 63 incinerators. They found that the death rate fell with the distance from incinerators. The report, from May 2004, Risk of adverse reproductive outcomes associated with proximity to municipal solid waste incinerators with high dioxin emission levels in Japan included the following important warning in the conclusions which Ryan says, “Has been ignored by those paid to protect our health.”
The Japan report states, “There is a need for further investigation to accumulate good evidence regarding the reproductive health effects of waste incinerator exposure.”
In 2007, a Scottish resident read an online newspaper report about infant death rates in Chingford, east London, that were being connected to the Edmonton incinerator. They wrote to Dr Burns, flagging up the findings. The newspaper report was based on Ryan’s ONS-sourced research, suggesting an infant mortality rate a statistically significant three times the national average.
On January 17, 2008, Dr Burns wrote: “In your most recent letter you have alerted me to work by Mr Michal Ryan, an independent researcher, reported on the website of the East London and West Essex Guardian, a local paper circulating in the Waltham Forest area of London.
“During investigations, Mr Ryan assembled information on infant deaths in London from which he observes that Chingford Green ward has the second highest number of infant deaths relative to the population in the whole of London.
“The ward is apparently next to Britain’s largest incinerator in Edmonton.
“As Chingford is an affluent area, Mr Ryan presents his work as a challenge to the view that any contribution to poor health from domestic waste incinerators is unlikely to be distinguishable from the effects of socioeconomic factors.”
Ryan tells Inside Croydon: “I’d mapped the infant death rates for all London electoral wards aggregated for the three years 2003-2005.
“That three-year set was criticised as follows: ‘To obtain large enough numbers to do an analysis at ward level, the LHO (London Health Observatory) suggest they would have to combine [infant mortality] data for 10-15 years at least. They consider that this would render the exercise meaningless’.”
Ryan says: “London’s electoral wards were unchanged for the 12 years between 2002 and 2013 and I mapped the infant mortality rates and looked to see which groups of four wards had the highest and lowest average rate of infant mortality.”
Ryan produced two tables which show a 15-fold difference between the average infant death rate in four wards grouped around Edmonton incinerator and four incinerator-less Bromley wards in south London.
In 2017, Ryan included his tables in a submission to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs parliamentary committee, and asked: “How effectively do government policies take into account the health and environmental impacts of poor air quality?”
Six years later, in 2023, the then MP for Wallington and Carshalton, Elliot Colburn, followed up the issues that had been raised by local campaigner Jim Duffy with DEFRA, where a minister tried to suggest that the sudden sharp rise in infant mortality rates in Selhurst, Waddon and Broad Green wards of Croydon following the start of the Beddington incinerator’s operation were all because of social deprivation.
The ONS stopped producing ward-level data in 2019.
Licence breakers: the Beddington incinerator has broken the conditions of its licence almost once a month since it began commercial operation. In just 10 months since Oct 2023 there have been 16 licence breaches, including six for acidic sulphur dioxide gas
The Beddington Lane incinerator was built close to the Sutton-Croydon boundary in order to service a £1billion, 25-year contract with the South London Waste Partnership, an unaccountable quango established by Kingston, Merton, Sutton and Croydon councils to handle their boroughs’ rubbish.
Burning other people’s crap – especially toxic crap, like plastics – is now such a lucrative business for Viridor and their US-based owners, global investment company KKR, that they want to truck in ever more rubbish to Beddington from across southern England to increase their profits, and therefore the volume of toxic pollution pumped into the atmosphere across south London.
Bit-by-bit, Viridor have increased their capacity over the years: their latest licence capacity application would have them burning 382,286 tonnes of waste every year.
According to the logging of Viridor’s own emissions reports, in the 66 months between March 2019 and August 2024 – the period it has been in commercial operation – there have been 57 breaches of Beddington Lane incinerator’s licence.
That’s close to once every month.
In the most recent 10 months for which data is available, between October 2023 and August 2024, there have been 16 licence breaches at Beddington.
Six of those have been for high levels of sulphur dioxide, the corrosive, acidic gas.
To paraphrase the question that Michael Ryan has been asking for the past 20 years: How effectively do government policies and agencies take into account the health and environmental impacts of poor air quality?
Read more: Viridor’s charge sheet: incinerator operator’s eco-vandalism
Read more: Viridor incinerator fined for multiple pollution permit breaches
Read more: Viridor incinerator breaks its toxic VOC permit for 40th time
- There’s a running total of the breaches by Viridor’s Beddington incinerator at http://www.merton.tv/incinerator-breaches/
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Is there any evidence that we can find of people at local authorities and other agencies that have approved the building of these fume-belching incinerators accepting backhanders from the companies who build/operate these environmental hate crime sites, to look the other way, and deny all evidence of their evil effects?
Well we published detailed accounts of how a Sutton LibDem was a lifelong friend of the chair of Viridor, but failed to declare the interest when he was a member of the planning committee that granted permission for the Beddington scheme.
And then there was the generous grant from Viridor’s charity arm to a church building used by Sutton LibDems for their meetings and canvassing sessions…
Leaving aside the environmental considerations, let’s think of this incinerator simply as a power station for a moment…. In order to generate electricity from burning anything you need to build a turbine heat engine and the maximum efficiency of a heat engine is dependent on the difference between whatever it’s maximum temperature is and it’s heat sink – the water it uses to boil for steam … as defined by the Carnot cycle.
The main reason most power stations are now by the sea isn’t just to decrease pollution it’s because the engineers who built them realised that while there’s not much in it, sea water is almost always colder than river water and those few degrees make a big operational difference to your maximum theoretical power output.
This is why power stations like Battersea & Croydon B were closed – they were in the wrong place.
So why are we going backwards and building lots of small power stations near population centres? It may seem counter intuitive but if we sent our rubbish on a trip to the seaside I recon we’d get many more Watts per binliner…
IC’s sophisticated and well-educated readers are all familiar with the Carnot Cycle, Anthony.
They also know that it’s perfectly possible for modern incinerators to run cleanly – it’s just that the operators, as reported by IC, don’t seem to give a fuck.
Just for the record, Battersea wasn’t ‘in the wrong place’, the district heating system it incorporated meant it had to be close to the homes it served.
Don’t think anyone remains under the delusion, as trotted out by the Tories when they advocated Croydon signing up to this toxic deal, that incinerators can ever “run cleanly”.
There will always be emissions. There will always be pollution.
Thanks again Inside Croydon! Nicely detailed summary of the issues around our health, living near the incinerator and the lax response of those supposed to be looking into this.
“Energy from Waste” is not far removed from dirty waste incineration. The number of infant deaths has been found to be higher near to waste incinerators. Extra deaths may well be caused in elderly people, if the figures were available. Dirty incinerators would also increase hospital admissions for bronchial problems.
A significant number of children in one new estate in Hackbridge have been found to be suffering from adenoid problems which are associated with air pollution. For many their condition is serious enough to be advised to have surgery. Hackbridge is less than a mile from the incinerator.