Medact North East joins SINE to push Newcastle City Council to withdraw their involvement with new waste incinerator
On Saturday 14th September, health professionals and members of Stop Incineration North East gathered outside Newcastle Civic Centre to protest the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TVERF), a proposed waste incinerator near Grangetown in Redcar. The incinerator poses severe health and environmental risks, and would cause the greatest harm to communities who already suffer disproportionately due to the climate crisis.
An open letter signed by 180 local health workers was handed into Newcastle city council in the Newcastle Civic Centre, to the backdrop of a street theatre bringing the waste incinerator to life, members of Stop Incineration North East (SINE) donning bin bags and a menacingly toothed-incinerator, apt when incinerators are built in low income areas which are already at the sharp end of health inequalities. While to some perhaps a strange sight on an otherwise sunny Saturday morning, a much less jarring sight than what the proposed incinerator would do to a community.
The open letter was certainly not the first time this conversation has been had with Newcastle City Council. The vows to never again burn waste, following the Byker incinerator scandal where Newcastle City Council was prosecuted for its handling of toxic ash from a local incinerator, however, have transpired to be resoundingly hollow.
The Redcar Incinerator would not only worsen air quality but also is likely to decrease recycling rates and increase traffic, noise, and CO2 emissions in the region. There is no safe level of exposure to pollutants and just 100 miles across the border, in Scotland, incinerators have already been banned.
Incineration and associated pollutants have adverse health impacts across the lifecourse, impacting everything from child health – air pollutants seeing infants born with lower birth weights and higher rates of asthma – to cardiovascular disease, cancers and dementia in older life. The detrimental impact of incineration impacts everything from mental health, with higher rates of depression, to reproductive health, impacting fertility, to wider issues such as rates of violence – highlighting how issues such as the Redcar incinerator are relevant to all of us as healthcare professionals, regardless of our specialities.
Waste incinerators in the UK are three times more likely to be located in low-income communities – this act of environmental injustice thus intimately intertwined with wider social injustices, emphasising how time and again health inequalities in the North East are not inevitable, but a conscious product of policy choices. Indeed, Grangetown is one of the most deprived areas in the North East – and the whole country – and already has among the highest rates of deaths due to respiratory disease and lower life expectancy, and less time lived in health, with women in Redcar having an average healthy life expectancy of only 52.2 years. The proportion of their lives lived in ill health will only amplify if the waste incinerator were to go ahead.
As health professionals, we must raise the alarm on the health and environmental impacts that affect the communities that we serve in the North East, and as health inequalities widen, our obligation to patients must extend beyond the hospital ward.
Medact North East and SINE’s protest on 14th September 2024 was covered by local press including the Newcastle Chronicle and Hexham Courant. The story was covered nationally by the BBC, as well as via broadcast on BBC Radio Tees, BBC Radio Newcastle, and ITV Tyne Tees.
