The Viridor incinerator at Beddington has broken its licence terms 16 times between Oct 2023 and Aug 2024 – including six times for high levels of emissions of sulphur dioxide, the corrosive, acidic gas
Residents living near a massive waste incinerator have been handed £1million in a settlement over a legal action brought over the pollution caused by Viridor’s Runcorn plant.
Licence breaches: the Beddington incinerator has broken the conditions of its licence 57 times since 2019, as well as having to deal with several fires at the plant
But the payment came with strings – with the 180 households each receiving around £4,500 only on condition that they signed a gagging clause, an NDA or non-disclosure agreement.
The revelation came as part of the second day of reports by BBC News, featured on television and the Radio 4 Today programme.
Croydon, Sutton, Merton and Kingston, through the unaccountable quango, the South London Waste Partnership, have a £1billion, 25-year contract with Viridor to burn their boroughs’ waste – and rubbish trucked in from across London and south-east England – at the “energy-from-waste” plant in Beddington.
Viridor’s Beddington incinerator has been fully operational since 2019.
Recycling rates across the four SLWP boroughs have fallen in the five years since.
Office of National Statistics data indicates that infant mortality rates in three wards in the north of Croydon – Waddon, Broad Green and Selhurst – increased sharply in the year immediately after the Beddington incinerator began operations.
And according to Viridor’s own reporting of its licence breaches, the Beddington incinerator has broken the terms of its Environment Agency licence at an average rate of almost once a month since it started operations.
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.
The BBC is reporting that burning household rubbish in giant incinerators is “the dirtiest way the UK generates power”.
Dirty business: after 20 years of industrial-scale incineration, the BBC is reporting on the dangers
“Nearly half of the rubbish produced in UK homes, including increasing amounts of plastic, is now being incinerated,” the BBC reported yesterday.
The BBC examined five years of data from across the country, and found that burning waste produces the same amount of greenhouse gases for each unit of energy as coal power, which came to an end in Britain last month.
And it is poorer neighbourhoods who are bearing the brunt of the blight of this shift to incineration. “BBC analysis suggests the burden of the UK’s waste is disproportionately falling on deprived areas… which are 10 times more likely to have an energy-from-waste incinerator in their midst than in the wealthiest areas.”
The BBC’s reporting focused on Runcorn, Cheshire, on the opposite side of the River Mersey from Liverpool, where Viridor operates the country’s largest incinerator, burning 1million tonnes of household rubbish per year.
But they also filmed at Beddington, including interviewing long-time campaigner against the Viridor incinerator, Nick Mattey, an independent councillor in Sutton.
In Runcorn, local businessman George Parker refused to sign Viridor’s NDA and so received no payment. “It’s a million-pound hush fund and a gagging order. That’s why they’re doing it, they’re keeping everybody quiet,” Parker told the BBC.
Viridor refused to comment on its £1million settlement or on the non-disclosure agreement, and it hid behind the ineffectual nature of the watchdog Environment Agency, claiming that the emissions from its Runcorn plant remained within permitted levels. “Any complaints were fully investigated with feedback provided to residents,” Viridor told the BBC.
Residents of Sutton and Croydon already know just what “fully investigated” means when the EA looks into the operations of incinerators, like the one at Beddington.
The BBC’s investigation found breaches of air quality controls have increased both at incinerators across England between 2019 and 2023.
“The number of these permit breaches has risen from an average of 3.4 in 2019 to 5.5 per incinerator in 2023,” the BBC reports.
“Last year 73% of facilities in England reported transgressions.”
Local councils such as Croydon and Sutton, hooked into long-term incinerator deals, face a financial imperative to provide the “fuel” for the incineration plants, rather than encouraging their residents into greener recycling of household waste.
As well as a trend towards less recycling since the use of incinerators, the BBC’s investigation suggests that we are burning increasing amounts of plastic.
“Plastic is made of fossil fuels and burning it produces high levels of greenhouse gases,” the BBC said.
“The BBC’s five-year analysis used data on actual pollution levels recorded by operators at their incinerators, and found that energy-from-waste plants are now producing the same amount of greenhouse gases per unit of electricity as if they were burning coal.”
Read more: Health agencies ignored public’s concerns on incinerator
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/
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
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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
“Recycling rates across the four SLWP boroughs have fallen in the five years since.” And that is not because residents are not using recycling bins any more. Instead, it is because Veolia are taking all rubbish from all bins in Croydon to feed the fume-belching incinerator at Beddington !
Do you know what being burnt there from residents bin collections ,apart from landfill collections i.e green waste collection? am interested to know what happens to the recycling items we take time to sort prior to collection.
A campaigner found that rubbish in street recycling bins were being taken directly to the incinerator. He placed tracking devices in the bins. Within an hour the waste arrived at the incinerator without even being sorted. Shown on Merton TV.
I don’t live that further from site unfortunately I am still awaiting for my compensation and I have some serious medical conditions with my COPD lung disease kidney pacemakers in heart etc.
£4500 is peanuts. I hope the residents are able to refuse this paltry amount, evilly attached to a gagging clause, for who knows what the long term consequences of living in close proximity to this toxic incinerator will be.
Household by household, the value of the settlement does spread quite thin. The woman interviewed by the BBC claims she is unable to sell her blighted home to move elsewhere – there must be before and after values on the properties in her street.
But the principle is very important.
If Viridor is admitting a liability around one of their incinerators, it could be applied elsewhere, and might make it commercially impossible for them to continue with this business.
What is the radius they are paying compensation within, and does this include businesses? And how do you claim? Or do they come to you?
Our understanding is that this was a form of class action, brought by households and businesses closest to the plant.
Is a gagging clause on a matter of the utmost public interest even legal? It shouldn’t be.
Happens all the time. Remember the Ryan Giggs superinjunction? The one about Boris’s children? And the Starmer one… oh, not supposed to mention that
Those ‘super injunctions’ were a matter of no importance – this is sometrhing else. Jeremy Clarkson once famously said of his own ‘gagging order’, “(they) don’t work: you take out an injunction … and immediately news of that injunction and the people involved and the story behind the injunction is in a legal-free world on Twitter and the internet. It’s pointless.”
And this injunction didn’t work, because at least two claimants refused to accept it.
Now imagine if there were class actions at every Viridor incinerator
Listening to a waste expert on BBC explain that the purpose of introducing the incinerators was to avoid using landfill where waste food was the cause of methane emissions, is no longer relevant because we all have food waste bins so food is separated out. The thought of all that plastic and metals, etc, being burnt and people breathing that stuff in is revolting and without a doubt must be very dangerous to people’s health. Who cares about the contracts with the incinerator companies, pay them off and save people’s lives.
Many thanks Inside Croydon! Great coverage on this important issue!
Things are not as bad as they were, Part 1 When we moved to Croydon in 1977, our house in West Thornton was downwind of the old Purley Way coal-fired power station. We didn’t realise at the time, but the air quality was not that good. It closed in 1984, just after we moved to – we hoped – cleaner Purley.