Ahead of the report's publication on June 20, FoE's campaign director Mike Childs wrote to the chief executives of local authorities asking them to use their influence as members of NSCA to delay the publication of the report until it could be substantially improved, saying that it was highly misleading and biased towards incineration.
And a few days before publication, on June 14, Charles Secrett wrote to the NSCA's president Derek Osborn attacking the report by saying that it failed to address the need to reduce resource use and encourage recycling and asked the president to use his influence to prevent its publication.
In his reply, on June 18, Mr Osborn said that the report was not intended to provide a full analysis of the objectives of national waste management policy and how they could best be advanced.
Mr Osborn said: “The report had the much narrower purpose of analysing information about the characteristics of modern incineration as a method that might have to play a part in future waste management strategy; and the public's awareness of, and response to it.”
Concern
He added that the Society shared the view of FoE as to the importance of waste minimisation and waste reuse or recycling as the highest priorities. “We share your concern about the low levels of recycling in this country and the apparent ineffectiveness of the measures that the government has so far taken to promote more recycling. Incineration with energy recovery presents itself as one obvious option in this context.
“The question then arises whether this can be done in a way that is sufficiently clean to avoid the risks which FoE and others have drawn attention to. Our report was intended to review the evidence about the acceptability of modern incineration methods in this context.
“We believe that the evidence assembled in our report confirms the judgement that properly managed, the best modern incineration technology can provide an acceptable way of handling that part of the municipal waste stream that cannot be recycled.”
Unjustified
In response to Mr Child's letter, the NSCA's chairman of council, Michael O'Leary wrote to local authorities explaining why FoE's attacks were “unjustified and misconceived”.
FoE claimed that the “conclusions of the studies flowed directly from funding by waste companies”, but Mr O'Leary said: “The work was steered by an independent academic advisory board, and funding was provided through the Landfill Tax Credit Scheme by a consortium of ten relevant organisations, including local authorities, companies and the Environment Agency.”
On claims that the report was poorly researched, misleading and contained factual inaccuracies, Mr O'Leary added: ” We are confident that the reports meet the Society's well-established high standards of balance and objectivity. The only inaccuracy of significance quoted is that the report fails to use the most up-to-date statistics on recycling levels around Europe. International comparisons on recycling across Europe are bedeviled by differences in definition. We believe that the statistics used give the most accurate comparative picture.”
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