Ministers for Environment are disregarding impact of incineration

Indaver, with the knowledge of Environment Ministers Alan Kelly and Paudie Coffey, is again attempting to foist its outdated, dirty incinerators on Cork Harbour.

Earlier this year, junior minister, Paudie Coffey, who has special responsibility for planning, told Cork County Council it must drop its ban in its county development plans on building industrial-scale incinerators. There is little doubt that Minister Coffey could only send such a letter with the authorisation of Minister Kelly with whom the buck lies in the Department of the Environment.

The communities in Cork fought this company’s previous applications at great cost. They called in doctors, toxicologists, geologists, engineers, waste and toxic use reduction specialists as well as climate change experts and fire safety personnel to advise and attend the public hearings. The case for the incinerator was decisively lost in 2011 and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

The latest application, for an even larger burner on the same Ringaskiddy site, next to the Naval College, is to be lodged shortly with An Bord Pleanála. That this should be allowed to happen is an affront to our elected county councillors who voted so decisively to keep commercial incineration out of our county and to the 30,000 people in Cork who objected.

Are we to keep fighting these detrimental applications again and again until those in charge of us, together with those who would profit from us, get the answer they want?

The proposal is a lose, lose one for the environment, for real energy conservation, the local economy, health, farming and tourism.

The ministers have either not bothered to study or have disregarded critical facts. Do they not care that distinguished toxicologists warned at the previous public hearings of the toxicity to humans, animals and crops of ultra-fine particles emitted by incinerators and carried large distances by the wind, contaminating land?

These particles are able to penetrate the pulmonary cell walls. The Ministers are ignoring the advantages of clean alternatives, e.g. mechanical and biological treatment (MBT).

At the last oral hearing it was shown the carbon cost of incineration with combined heat and power was £10.2 per tonne, compared with £6.01 per tonne for MBT with anaerobic digestion generating heat and electricity. There is huge scope for improved product and process design for energy efficiency and waste prevention and this should be the priority.

Our Ministers for the Environment are unworthy of their title and should resign.

Rosie Cargin

Kinsale Environment Watch,

The Grove, Compass Hill,

Kinsale, Co Cork