Haringey Council has broken ranks with other members of the North London Waste Authority (NLWA) by calling for a rethink of a £600m energy-from-waste (EfW) project.
The North London Heat and Power Project at Edmonton (pictured) is intended to replace an ageing EfW plant with a new one able to divert 700,000 tonnes of waste a year from landfill, and will also house a recycling facility capable of handling 135,000 tonnes a year of material.
Authority members are due next week to award further construction contracts, but Haringey’s Labour leader Peray Ahmet has called for a halt while other options are examined.
Haringey had supported the project under its previous Labour leader Joseph Ejiofor. No other borough has yet backed its revised position.
In a letter to the NWLA, Ahmet said: “Despite reassurances, residents and local councillors are very worried about the air pollution from the new incinerator, which will be significantly larger than the current one.
“Our community also wants to do more recycling, and feels the size of the incinerator will mean there is an incentive to produce more waste in order to feed the associated district energy network.”
Ahmet urged the NLWA to pause the project while it considered options such as installing carbon capture at the project’s outset rather than later on, and “whether more can be done to reduce its environmental impact”.
The NLWA is understood to be able to proceed on a majority vote of its members without needing Haringey’s consent, although this would be unusual.
Its other members are the boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Islington and Waltham Forest.
If the project were scrapped there would be an additional cost of £20m a year if existing facilities had to be kept in use, the NLWA said.
Authority chair Clyde Loakes, deputy Labour leader of Waltham Forest, said: “We are working through the issues raised in [Ahmet’s] letter and will provide a detailed response in due course.
“In the meantime, I would like to reiterate that the existing plant is the oldest in Europe and needs to be replaced urgently. The project is an important part of all our boroughs’ drive to cut carbon emissions and we are accelerating our plan for carbon capture and storage as part of the project.”
Loakes said the proposed facility had been designed flexibly to encourage people to recycle more and would not compete with recycling or create demand for waste.
He said it would also improve air quality by using “the most advanced pollution controls available”.
“Any delay would jeopardise the environmentally responsible service we provide for all north London boroughs, and inevitably make waste management services much more expensive for the environment, councils and council taxpayers,” he added.
