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.
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 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/
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