Fifty shades of greenwash !

When you think of a green investment bank you think of err a bank that is green that invests in green energy such as wind, solar and tidal power or innovative waste recycling technology. You don't think of a green bank investing in waste incineration which in many cases sits at the bottom of the waste hierarchy!

BUT!

 

that is exactly the case playing out here in Derby UK where the UK Green Investment Bank are funding an ENERGOS waste incineration plant being constructed in an area of poor health in the city and a plant subject to mass objection by local people across not one but two public inquiries. The project is defined as an incineration plant as covered in my previous blog post http://derby-waste-a-rubbish-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/burn-baby-burn.html
Funding to the tune of £64 MILLION has been secured by the developer SHANKS from the UK Green Investment Bank - often referred to as GIB for their project to burn the waste of Derby and Derbyshire.
What was exposed at the 2nd public inquiry into the Sinfin Lane project was that in its standard electricity only mode the plant would fail to meet the requirements of the R1 formula - which is a test of plant efficiency and by failing to meet the R1 standard the plant would be classed as a D10 disposal plant which sits in the disposal section of the waste hierarchy - or to give it its other name - the bottom of the hierarchy. SHANKS the company proposing the plants construction as part of a long term waste deal to dispose of the waste of Derby and Derbyshire have never put forward a customer for the large volume of heat and steam that the plant will generate as a bi-product of its disposal process.
The Green Investment Bank were quick to trumpet their funding proposal in a press release in August 2014 talking of a plant that would recycle 35,000 tonnes of materials and divert 170,000 tonnes from landfill of the 190,000 tonnes the plant will accept yearly. The 35,000 tonnes of materials recycled is at odds with the claimed recycling rate for the plant and must include the bottom ash being used in construction to get anywhere near that claimed by GIB and in relation to landfill diversion a percentage of the tonnage weight will be lost by natural drying processes which could be attained by pre treatment before landfill.
GIB also refer to the remaining waste being used to generate renewable energy in a statement by Shaun Kingsbury who is the chief executive of GIB. The elephant in the room with such a statement is that the GIB's own website defines such energy as coming from biogenic material but in the case of the Sinfin, Derby plant the mixed waste cannot be considered fully biogenic - because it contains plastics and other none biogenic feedstock. That's before we even consider if burning biogenic material is actually renewable! can it be if we have no control in relation to the replacement of such biogenic materials?
Further to this by providing funding for the Derby waste incineration plant GIB are supporting the burning of waste that could be recycled because the councils have signed up to a contract requiring them to procure waste of specific forms including tonnage, calorific, biodegradable and moisture content.
The Green Investment Bank has been challenged on a number of their claims - talk about fifty shades of green !
I await their reply !

©SIMON BACON 2016



Burn baby burn !

One of the biggest myths in waste management is that the new Advanced Thermal Treatment (ATT) plants are not incineration plants! Time and again when these new plants are wheeled out by councils and developers we are told they are clean, green AND NOT INCINERATION !
Developers put forward exotic names for the processes they are trying to peddle like GASIFICATION or PYROLYSIS and they claim their processes do not burn wastes but heat them producing syngas which is then used for power generation.
While standard mass burn incineration burns waste in an oxygen rich environment developers peddling their alternatives often use controlled levels of air / oxygen and in some cases no oxygen in what they consider to be a more controlled process. These processes are now being pushed across the UK and in recent years a number of proposals have been put forward for Derby and Derbyshire.
Councils and developers when attempting to gain planning permission favour using terms such as gasification and pyrolysis because by doing so it keeps the word incineration out of the public eye because when rumbled councils and developers come up against stiff opposition.
Such processes are claimed to be clean and green and at times even those who object to waste incineration plants are fooling into thinking such plants are a better alternative to mass burn incineration and this extends to government who now offer subsidies for electricity produced by Advanced Thermal Treatment plants. The elephant in the room is that mass burn, gasification and pyrolysis are ALL incineration plants because no matter if its a throw it in and burn it plant or a plant that produces syngas via controlled processes when the gas is burnt its an incineration plant.
We know this because Europe have defined what constitutes an incineration plant in the waste incineration directive - often known as WID.  This set of regulations sets out the description of such plants, their control and the expected emissions standard for the plant.

 

So while up and down the country the same argument can be heard at waste gasification plant public consultations about the proposals not being incineration councils and developers cannot escape facts ! and the facts are EUROPE SAYS THESE PLANTS ARE INCINERATION PLANTS! So that is what they are!

 







©SIMON BACON 2016



Bins on streets - Section 46 can help !

One of the most important waste related things we all need as residents is a successful waste disposal system that manages waste sustainably. A disposal system needs to be easy to understand and simple to take part in when we as residents are expected to recycle our waste - as we should do. We create the waste so it is only right that we dispose of it safely and correctly. The trouble is some of us either don't understand the process of waste disposal - recycling being a prime example or we don't want to take part at all - we just like to consume and dump, consume and dump day in day out.
If people don't understand the concept of recycling or simply don't care this can cause a number of issues. It can lead to bins being left unemptied if they contain items that should not be there. It can lead to lower value recyclate being gathered which may not impact on our council at first but long term can impact on values nationally and any falling price in recycling is a bad place to be because in the end that fall in prices finds its way back to the council via higher gate fees etc.

Where bins are left on streets - be it a contaminated recycling bin, an empty recycling bin or simply just a residual waste bin this situation drags a community down. A street full of bins degrades a community causing a blight by blocking pavements, attracting side waste and fly tipping, all aspects we don't want to experience as residents in our community. This is a very common issue in Derby in a number of wards including Normanton, Arboretum and Abbey to name just three. Sometimes residents have legitimate reasons for leaving bins on the streets such as lack of access to a rear garden. Sometimes the street is the only place for the bin in such cases but the council needs to confirm this is actually the case and not simply a lazy excuse. The council should also work to address access issues where possible - for example by clearing blocked alleyways or reviewing issues such as rights of access issues where a resident has blocked the ability of others to access properties from the rear by building fencing or planting hedging.
There is one government act known as the Environmental Protection Act 1990 which gives councils the power if they choose to make residents remove bins from the street outside set collection periods. Section 46 of the act which focuses on household waste collection gives councils the power to set out times when it is acceptable to place bins on the street and allows for action to be taken if bins are in place outside this period. For Some reason Derby City Council are not using that ability and so the streets of Normanton, Arboretum, Abbey, Mackworth and other wards are left with streets full of bins which leads to recycling bin contamination and fly tipping.
Is there a political will in Derby to use such powers or do those in power favour a cluttered street scene over making the electorate take responsibility for their waste disposal bins.

©SIMON BACON 2016



Demolition Derby comes to Sinfin Lane.



Housing who needs housing eh ! Shanks Waste certainly don't having applied recently to knock down 1-5 Railway Cottages on Sinfin Lane in Derby. These cottages until recently were the nearest neighbour to the controversial waste incineration plant Shanks Waste and Interserve are building on the Sinfin Tannery site in the Sinfin area of Derby. After a lengthy battle to stop this proposal including two public inquiries and various legal challenges planning was granted and construction has started. In the late Autumn of 2014 the residents living in these homes got a nasty surprise when their landlord terminated their leases on the homes leading to them being forced from their homes in the run up to Christmas. Shanks Waste trying to smooth things over said they purchased with vacant possession - well yes because the previous landlord shoved them out in the run up to Christmas - such festive spirit!
Having paid £390,000 for the properties as a whole Shanks waste would not say why they wanted to buy them - they had never been earmarked in public as forming part of the site before so what was the reasoning! They claimed in an article in the Derby Telegraph that it was to allow flexibility and efficiency but they had no definite plans for the land. You can read more here http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Waste-row-firm-wants-bulldoze-houses-near/story-26013870-detail/story.html
So we have a waste disposal company who can afford to spend close to £400,000 on a group of properties to then simply knock them down while there is a large city wide housing waiting list where people are crying out for homes.
As the waste incineration plant is being built on council land and is part of a 25 year waste disposal deal between Derby City and Derbyshire County Council it is quite clear who is paying bills for this proposal - Council Tax payers !
Update on 07th Oct 2015
This is how Shanks treats its neighbours - buy up the houses forcing the residents out and knock em down !

 

 

 

NEIGHBOURS ! EVERYBODY NEEDS GOOD NEIGHBOURS !

 

 

©SIMON BACON 2016

Educating Derby on rubbish is err RUBBISH!

With the current state of the streets in areas of Derby blighted by fly tipped waste, in the image below it's recyclable waste dumped on Middleton Street, Normanton

 recycling bins being removed because of claims that residents don't use them correctly http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Rubbish-bins-Derby-s-green-protesters-blues/story-25756604-detail/story.html which has been questioned on this blog before due to a lack of evidence and then the dire spiral downwards of the cities recycling rate from a high of 48% to a new predicted low of 32% covered in this previous blog post http://derby-waste-a-rubbish-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/the-decay-of-recycling-in-derby.html . It would seem a simple no brainer to spend a healthy amount of the councils waste budget on waste minimisation and education.
Sadly this is not the case as a recent FOI request on the subject put into Derby City Council after I viewed the councils accounts highlighted that in total the council was spending less than £50,000 on waste minimisation and education while paying Resource Recovery Solutions - RRS (a Shanks waste company) over £8.66 million for disposal of waste and operation of the Raynesway HWRC site. Of that £8.66 million less than £34,000 was paid to RRS for minimisation and education and when added to the spend from outside of the waste contract the figure was less than £50,000.
It struck me why are we paying a waste contractor over £8 million to handle waste - much of which will end up landfilled or incinerated via a contract which cost in 2013/14 £118 per tonne when the alternatives being reduction, reuse and recycling cost £10 per tonne or less! The council keep telling us they have no money due to government cuts but they are actually preferring to handle waste via its most expensive route.
Come on its a no brainer isn't it ? every tonne extra recycled costing the council £10 or reduced - costing the council nothing is a tonne the council isn't paying £118 a tonne to dispose of.
On 28th January I went to the Full Council meeting at Derby City Council to put a public question to the council in relation to why the council is spending so much on disposal compared to educating residents.

f. Question from Simon Bacon to Councillor Afzal 

In 2013/14 Derby City Council paid Resource Recovery Solutions - a SHANKS company £8,666,724 to handle 79,995 tonnes of the waste of Derby. Of that just £33,279 was spent on waste minimisation and education and when added to non RRS spend on waste minimisation and education of £13,984 equates to spending less than £50,000 on sustainable waste management education.   
Why is Derby City Council spending so little on waste reduction while spending so much on disposal via landfill and incineration.

The response was a fair bit of waffle about what they are going to do bla bla bla but they also set out that Household waste management costs for 2012/13 published by Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and reported by the Audit Commission, indicate that of £3.3 Billion spent nationally on household waste management, only £25.6 Million was spent of waste minimisation, which is less than 1% of the total national spend on household waste. Derby allocated around 0.5% of its 2013-14 waste spends on recycling and waste reduction initiatives. However, the national average cannot be considered an absolute target for spend and the city is satisfied it has got good value for money from the budget it has spent on educating its residents and young people in waste matters.

What the council is admitting there is that it spends less than the national average on waste education at a time when the streets are in a state, blue bin recycling is being removed and the recycling rate is spirally downwards.
As a follow up question I asked at a time when recycling is going so wrong in Derby is the council spending so little.
The answer came from the leader of the council Ranjit Banwait who indicated they couldn't spend more on waste education due to government cuts. What Councillor Banwait ignores in saying this is the saving that comes from educating residents on waste disposal becomes self financing due to the gulf between recycling costing £10 and residual disposal costing £118 - every tonne diverted via education saves £108 !
Landfilling and incinerating waste is rubbish ! we should be educating residents how to dispose of their waste in the correct way leading to cleaner streets, better, higher recycling rates and reduced disposal costs -
SAVING US MONEY !

©SIMON BACON 2016



The decay of recycling in Derby

Recycling in Derby is under attack by the city council who are now wedded to a waste contract spanning decades to feed a waste incineration plant under construction. The plant will require them to procure waste of set tonnage, moisture, calorific and biomass values which is at odds with the requirement to meet recycling targets such as the 50% 2020 national figure or the councils shared target with Derbyshire County Council of 55%.  Having hit a high of 48% recycling in 2010/11 the council itself is predicting a fall to 33% if their recycling scheme does not improve.
The removal of the free garden and food waste recycling scheme played a large part in the sudden downfall of the recycling scheme. It's replacement with a £40 charge for a part year garden waste only service led to widespread rejection and a sudden fall in the recycling rate.
Not satisfied with that destruction applied to the councils recycling scheme in 2013 the council decided to target specific areas of the city to remove kerbside recycling while claiming this was due to contamination issues and the need to improve the street scene. Areas targeted were Arboretum, Normanton, Abbey and New Zealand (an area of Mackworth). What became clear was that the council was targeting specific streets - including my own in Normanton so it was time to start asking questions.
It soon became clear having made an FOI on the subject that the council had no evidence to back their targeting of specific streets such as my own as contamination is extracted at processing time.
FOI 4662 confirmed this
"Tonnage data at round/street level is not available for blue bins as contamination tonnages are assessed after processing. "
With that in mind I thought I might as well ask BIFFA the waste processor directly as they take in Derby blue bin material at their plant on Victory Road in Derby. Nobody is better placed to comment than the company that actually accepts the material so I spoke to Steve Norman Regional Operations Manager in September 2013 who answered with the following.

Q1 Does the Biffa MRF facility in Victory Road have the need to reject incoming loads delivered in by Derby City Council due to excessively contaminated material?

Answer: The site at Victory Road has not to date rejected loads delivered to it premises. On the whole the material received is of a good quality and contains very low levels of contamination.

In the end kerbside recycling was removed from Arboretum with the provision of a restricted number of bring sites - which regularly attract fly tipping.

 Recycling removal was reported here on Letsrecycle  http://www.letsrecycle.com/news/latest-news/derby-to-trial-recycling-collections-removal/
Move on a year and a bit like groundhog day the council wheeled out a plan to remove recycling from restricted areas of the New Zealand area of Mackworth ward - claiming once again that bins were contaminated. A classic Derby City Council consultation took place where residents responded asking to keep the recycling service only for them to be ignored with 2 out of 3 local councillors those being Cllrs Pegg and Whitby concluding the kerbside recycling should be removed. The story was covered by the Derby Telegraph in October 2014 - currently the scheme has yet to be removed - http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/BINS-CONTROVERSY-Blue-recycling-bin-collections/story-23787235-detail/story.html
After the rather undemocratic situation in the New Zealand area of the Mackworth ward the city decided why bother asking residents at all and so promptly announced they were going to remove kerbside recycling services from more streets in Arboretum and extend this into areas of the Normanton which is an area of the city the local Neighbourhood Board decided they did not want kerbside recycling removed from. This situation was reported recently on the Resource website http://resource.co/article/derby-remove-recycling-bins-more-households-6952
By this point I had already made an FOI into blue bin contamination because I recognised it was best practice since my investigations had taken place a year earlier and things could have changed.
FOI 6346 was put in to the council in September 2014 the councils own FOI dept responded to my question shown below -

3- How many loads of blue bin recyclables have been rejected by your contractor BIFFA at its Victory Road sorting facility in 2013/14

ANSWER: None, rejects are taken out during the sorting process. The average percentage of rejected material from the start of the new blue bin collection system on June 4^th 2013 to 31^st March 2014 was 5.8%.
 

It struck me that maybe I wasn't clear about the period I was interested in so I returned to the FOI dept for clarity which is shown below.

 

In relation to question 3 - rejected loads at the BIFFA site in error I referred to 2013/14 - what I had meant was 2013 / 2014 - ie 2013 and the year 2014 to date - please advise if the answer is any different."

 

Answer: No individual loads have ever been rejected, both in the old pre June 2013 arrangements or in the new current arrangements. All rejected materials have been and continue to be taken out as part of the sorting process.

 

So straight from the horses mouth we have statements from the council's own FOI dept that material IS NOT rejected by its sorting contractor because the process simply sorts the wheat from the chaff so to speak.

So where is the contaminated waste that causes the council so much horror that they remove swathes of kerbside recycling in the city?

The answer is who knows ! the council claim when bins are contaminated they are not collected by the council and are tagged. But where are all the tagged bins ? and if the councils own FOI dept says contamination is sorted out of the recyclate which backs up statements made by BIFFA are the councils just peddling a story to remove a service without actually having the evidence to back their claims.

Who are the losers ?

We all are as driving recycling backwards will lead to Derby missing government targets when it is clear that the technology in place addresses the issue of contamination. Removal of the kerbside service - which cost £10 per tonne in 2013/14 and replacing it with a disposal cost of circa £118 per tonne condemns Derby residents to paying a high premium to support the service removal - the council suggest this is £30,000. Finally the people who lose the most are the residents of the streets where recycling has been removed. Residents of Balaclava Road in Normanton for example will be expected to walk a round trip of almost 1,200 metres to a bring site on Havelock Road but even worse ! they cannot even do that as at the time this blog was written the new bring site had not even been installed !

 

©SIMON BACON 2016



 

 

 

 

The Tannery site gutted for development.

The destruction of the Sinfin Tannery site on Sinfin Lane Derby continues at pace. While the developer, Resource Recovery Solutions - a SHANKS waste company in association with Interserve through planning and the public inquiries painted the site as being a brownfield site the reality was somewhat different! While it was correct to suggest the site had housed industry previously - in this case a brick works and later an animal skin tannery all of which was demolished to suggest the site was brownfield would be to imply the site was an industrial wasteland. Those of us able to visit the site before the council removed that ability know very much that the site was actually a hub for wildlife next to an area of heavy industry - it was an oasis of grass, flowers, shrubs and trees and housed Derby's only population of Common Lizards - a BAP priority species. The image below shows what the site previously looked like.

Once the developer secured the go ahead for construction the site and its grassland was razed to the ground in late winter - a time when the Common Lizards would be hibernating but contractors carried out the work after a spell of poor weather turning the site into a mud bath.

Please take some time to watch a video from the site after contractors cleared the site

The developer was reported to Derbyshire police but the police took no action.
What may come as a surprise to some was the enthusiastic welcome Derby North MP Chris Williamson gave the funding of the waste incineration plant. A surprise because the MP is a vocal supporter of wildlife but happily welcomes the destruction of a site which was home to foxes and other mammals. He took to Twitter to announce his pleasure -

Chris Williamson ‏@ChriswMP Aug 21

Delighted Green Investment Bank's confirmed it'll finance Derby's waste treatment facility that'll reduce landfill & cut 50k tonnes of CO2

 

So what is the current status of the site ? Well construction of the access has started and the site has been basically gutted as shown in the final image - the only untouched areas being the Common Lizard holding area.

 

©SIMON BACON 2016