Despite nearly 1,000 breaches of its existing permit in a 15-month period, Viridor has had its licence extension for the Beddington incinerator granted, to the dismay of local councillors and environmentalists.
By STEVEN DOWNES
Toxic: the Viridor incinerator at Beddington, pumping pollution into our air since 2019
The Environment Agency, already known as the most useless of toothless watchdogs for its failures to police the water companies, has today managed to make that reputation worse still by granting toxic polluters Viridor their request to burn more rubbish at the Beddington incinerator.
The EA’s decision consigns generations of south Londoners to health problems caused by breathing polluted, even acidic, air from the incinerator’s emissions.
In a statement, the EA confirmed that Viridor’s licence application – submitted in 2022 – has been approved to increase “the processing capacity of the energy recovery facility to 382,286 tonnes per annum, an increase of 34,864 tonnes”.
The Beddington incinerator has been controversial since it was first proposed, and today the EA lumped a good deal of the blame for the latest licence extension on to the dodgy planning permission that was granted by Sutton’s Liberal Democrat-controlled council in 2014.
The responsibility for unleashing Viridor’s toxic, smoke-breathing monster, however, also falls to the many spineless politicians, of all parties, in Merton, Kingston and Croydon, with Sutton all members in the South London Waste Partnership, which jointly devised a £1billion contract with Viridor to burn their boroughs’ waste for 25 years.
Viridor’s latest licence extension is all about increasing the multi-billion company’s profit margin, at the expense of Londoners’ health. Viridor will continue to burn around 200,000 tonnes of the SLWP’s waste every year. But under the revised licence terms, 47% of the rubbish they will burn in future will be trucked in from other areas.
The exhaust emissions of the increased number of lorries driving through Croydon, and along the Purley Way to Beddington Lane, was not something considered by the EA, since they say that road traffic is a matter for local planners. The high number of HGV visits allowed to the Beddington plant was built-in to the original planning application approved by Sutton.
No limits: Sutton’s planning permission for the Beddington incinerator allows an almost limitless number of visits from HGVs
Extraordinarily, for a public body, the EA has ignored every single representation from the public.
The EA’s 136-page permit document shows that all local councils – even including Sutton’s previously incinerator-friendly LibDems – and individuals who responded to their consultations were opposed to the plan.
Today, the EA said, “Specialist officers have considered proposals in detail, along with information and evidence provided during two public consultations, and is satisfied the permit variation can be granted.
“The Environment Agency’s role is to assess each application and decide if it meets all requirements under relevant environmental legislation and provides a high level of protection to the environment and human health.
“It will only vary a permit if it is satisfied this is the case.
“Compliance at the site will continue to be robustly regulated in line with the conditions of the revised permit.” Those are our italics.
The EA’s “light-touch”, to almost non-existent, regulation of the water industry is the same approach being applied to the Beddington incinerator.
Viridor broke the existing limits on their licence 916 times between September 2022 and March 2024, and never bothered to report those failures to the EA, as required by their permit. “Robustly regulated” indeed.
And as they awaited the EA’s ruling, Viridor’s failures to manage their plant within supposedly “acceptable” limits increased.
In October 2025, Viridor’s Beddington plant pumped sulphur dioxide – the chemical used to make sulphuric acid – into the south London skies with emissions of 382.4 mg/m³, nearly double the permitted daily limit. The volume was literally off the scale on the plant’s public monitoring charts.
In general, the prevailing winds carry emissions from Viridor’s toxic twin chimneys out over Hackbridge, Wallington, towards Broad Green and Waddon and parts of northern Croydon.
Infant mortality rates in one part of Croydon, downwind from the waste incinerator at Beddington, increased by more than four times in the first year after Viridor began plying their polluting trade in south London, according to official data. The Environment Agency ignored calls from local environmentalists to conduct more survey work on infant deaths in areas downwind of the incinerator.
Going for the burn: the Viridor incinerator at Beddington could be burning waste for another 20 years
Indeed, the EA’s report published today shows the agency to be quite happy with all the breaches of the existing licence conditions.
In para 4.3.10 of their report, the EA says, “The facility has recorded a number of exceedances of permitted limits for emissions to air from the ERF.” Like our councils, the Environment Agency follows Viridor’s lead by avoiding the nasty word “incinerator”, preferring the bureaucratic and misleading “ERF” – for “energy recovery facility”.
“Exceedances have been recorded for carbon monoxide, TOC, sulphur dioxide and hydrogen chloride,” the EA notes. “These exceedances have generally only occurred for a short period of time, before the emissions are brought back below the permitted emission limits.
“Exceeding one of these limits by a small amount will not necessarily result in a measurable impact on the environment or harm to human health,” according to the EA, who added that “the plant could have performed better”.
The Agency goes on to describe the 900-plus breaches of Viridor’s licence as “marginal” and “insignificant”, “… and extremely unlikely to have resulted in any environmental or human health impacts”.
The add: “We did issue minor non-compliances and measures have been put in place by the operator to minimise the risk of these types of event happening in the future.”
The EA’s calm acceptance of big business’s promises has provided no reassurance to one local councillor.
“This is what happens when the planning process gets completely perverted,” said Nick Mattey, the independent councillor in Beddington who has been campaigning against the incinerator in his ward for more than a decade.
“It is truly sickening. When I see people who can’t breathe, when I see residents with cancer struggling for air simply because they live near this incinerator, it makes me feel physically sick.
“We have a mountain of toxic waste being burned right next to our homes. Our kids and our loved ones have to breathe this in just because of a corrupt planning decision.”
Read more: Infant death rates were up by 233% after incinerator fired up
Read more: Viridor’s charge sheet: incinerator operator’s eco-vandalism
Read more: Viridor incinerator fined for multiple pollution permit breaches
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