‘Greenwashing’ incinerator firms are burying evidence that burning household waste for energy can be more polluting than coal-fired power plants, openDemocracy can reveal.

Waste companies promote incinerators as generators of ‘renewable’ or ‘low-carbon’ energy but evidence from their own monitors shows that the UK’s 57 incinerators emitted more than seven million tonnes of fossil-based carbon dioxide last year, largely from burning plastic.

More than half of incinerated plastic is either “readily recyclable” or “potentially recyclable”, according to analysis of waste.

Some companies deceive children and teachers by supplying teaching material and hosting school trips in which misleading environmental claims are made about incineration.

Last year, the Environment Agency asked companies to start including CO2 information based on continuous monitoring in their annual performance reports.

Analysis of this data by openDemocracy and UK Without Incineration Network (UKWIN) has found that the average UK incinerator produces more than twice as much CO2 per unit of electricity as gas-fired power plants, and some have a higher carbon intensity than coal plants.

The amount of waste incinerated in the UK has more than doubled in less than a decade, up from 6.7 million tonnes in 2014 to 15.3 million tonnes last year. Recycling has flatlined over the same period, with the amount of incinerated household waste in England exceeding the amount recycled since 2019.

In part, this is because incineration is often the cheapest option for waste disposal. It is exempt from both the tax paid for landfill (£102 per tonne) and the UK emissions trading scheme (ETS), meaning waste companies do not have to pay for their pollution.

The waste management industry is building another 18 incinerators, with capacity to burn 5.7 million tonnes of waste, despite its commitment to reach net zero by 2040.

Shlomo Dowen, the national coordinator of UKWIN, said: “The huge environmental harm caused by incineration is completely unnecessary. We should all be working together to do away with incineration, and this starts by calling out the greenwash whenever we see it.”

Piers Forster, a professor of physical climate change and member of the independent Climate Change Committee, told openDemocracy that carbon emissions from incineration were already higher than the government had predicted in 2021 in its strategy for meeting net-zero emissions by 2050.

He called on incinerator operators “to be more honest and transparent about the carbon intensity of their operations”, and said they should be paying for their pollution, either via the ETS or another mechanism.

Misleading schoolchildren

A number of the UK’s incinerators have been accused of “peddling propaganda” to children and teachers on school trips.

The energy from Allington incinerator in Kent is more carbon intensive than coal plants and three times as carbon intensive as gas plants, according to analysis of its annual performance report submitted to the Environment Agency.

It emitted 1,195 grams of fossil CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour of electricity (g/kWh) exported to the grid last year, compared to coal plants’ 960g/kWh and gas plants’ 360g/kWh.

But FCC, Allington’s owner, fails to mention its very high carbon intensity in publicity material about the incinerator. Instead, it promotes the plant as a source of “renewable energy” – making that same claim to schoolchildren on educational tours.

Another waste firm, Veolia, supplies schools with teaching material that includes a video which describes its Staffordshire incinerator as a “completely green plant”.

In its notes for schools, Veolia, which operates 10 incinerators across the UK, says teachers should tell pupils that incinerators, which it calls energy recovery facilities (ERFs), are “an important source of renewable, sustainable energy”.

It fails to mention that its Staffordshire plant last year had a fossil carbon intensity almost as high as coal plants, at 948g/kWh.

A Veolia spokesperson said: “At no point has Veolia indicated that 100% of its ERF-derived energy is renewable. All information (not just teaching) materials about our ERF activity are consistent with that.”

Another firm, Viridor, runs school trips to its Ardley incinerator in Oxfordshire, where, according to its website, it teaches children “how Viridor is transforming what can't be recycled into vital renewable energy”.

Teaching materials created by Viridor omit that incineration causes greenhouse gas emissions and misleadingly state that the waste it burns is “non-recyclable”, ignoring a government-commissioned study that found that more than half of incinerated waste is “readily recyclable”.

Viridor said its reported emissions for Ardley incinerator did not take into account the alternative of landfilling or exporting the waste, which it said had a higher greenhouse gas footprint.

A spokesperson for the firm said: “Viridor has a commitment to achieving net zero by 2040 and is making material progress to deliver on that ambition.”

Dowen of UKWIN said: “It is appalling that children, along with the rest of the public, are being fed incinerator greenwash when what is really needed is honest conversations about how we can reduce and eventually eliminate waste. Peddling propaganda is not the way to build public trust.”

He continued: “Companies that rely on waste provided by householders and businesses should come clean about the true environmental cost of the throwaway culture from which they profit.”

Overlooking plastic’s impact

Roughly half the waste incinerated in the UK is ‘biogenic’ material, such as paper, wood, and food waste. The electricity this produces can be described as renewable because new trees and crops are planted.

But many waste companies imply in their public statements that all the electricity produced by incinerators, including from burning plastic, is renewable.

Some explicitly state that all their electricity is green, including Grundon, which owns Lakeside incinerator near Heathrow. It says on its website that the incinerator “generates 37 megawatts (MW) of sustainable power, enough to provide green electricity to 56,000 homes”.

Analysis of Grundon’s EA submission shows that almost half the 37MW comes from burning plastic and other fossil-based waste and only about 17MW of the electricity exported to the grid could be considered renewable.

More than two million tonnes of plastic was incinerated in the UK in 2020, according to the British Plastics Federation.

Sorting machines that remove more than 80% of the plastic before the remaining waste is burnt can be installed at incinerators, but waste companies in the UK have declined to invest in them – unlike their counterparts in Norway, the Netherlands and Spain.

Introducing these machines would have “an immediate and significant impact”, cutting direct emissions from incinerators by 49-56%, according to an independent report commissioned by the Scottish government.

Jacob Hayler, the executive director of the ESA, which represents incinerator owners, said pre-sorting facilities to remove plastic are “being explored” by waste firms but are “difficult and expensive”.

He added: “One of the key challenges is once you've got all this dirty plastic, what do you then do with it? At the moment it’s unlikely to be suitable for recycling [but] there are new technologies coming on like chemical recycling where they're hopeful that they might be able to treat some of these plastics that come off the front end [of incinerators].”

Green groups say the benefits of chemical recycling have been overstated by the waste and plastic industries.

Misleading claims

Incinerators are also far more polluting than companies claimed to councils and the Environment Agency (EA) when seeking planning permission or environmental permits.

A 2009 ‘greenhouse gas assessment’ submitted to the EA by Viridor to support its permit application for the Oxfordshire Ardley incinerator contained predictions that implied its electricity would have a carbon intensity of 610g/kWh.

Last year, Ardley’s actual carbon intensity was more than 1,000g/kWh, according to analysis of data in Viridor’s annual performance report.

Waste companies are continuing to make misleading claims in current planning applications for new incinerators.

MVV Environment says in its application for an incinerator in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, that it would recover “renewable/low carbon energy”. And a planning submission for an incinerator in north Lincolnshire, proposed by Dublin-based energy firm Solar 21, claims it would provide “up to 95MW of low carbon energy”. This ignores the fact that a large share of the energy would come from fossil-based waste.

It’s not just the waste firms making misleading claims. Some councils that have signed long contracts with incinerator companies have also implied that all the waste they collect for incineration is turned into renewable energy.

Kent County Council tells residents on the waste section of its website that household waste sent to Allington incinerator “is used to create electricity, a renewable energy source that ensures waste simply is put to good use”.

North Kesteven District Council, Mole Valley District Council and Northumberland County Council tell residents that their waste is turned into “renewable energy” or “renewable electricity” .

Recycle for Greater Manchester, which is funded by councils, claims on the “myth-busting” section of its website that plastic bags sent for incineration are turned into “green energy”.

Basingstoke council falsely told a resident that burning plastic packaging from Ikea and other sources created renewable energy.

Waste companies and many councils argue that incineration is better than landfill but Piers Forster described this claim as “increasingly bogus”.

He said the decline in food waste being dumped in landfill sites means they produce less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, adding that many landfill sites also now capture methane. Scientists also say the claim wrongly implies that landfilling waste is the only alternative to burning it.

A need to decarbonise

In December, the government committed to halving the amount of waste per person that is sent for incineration or landfill by 2042.

But ministers are yet to set out how they will achieve that target. They have repeatedly delayed promised measures that would work towards it, such as a deposit return system for drinks containers and an ‘extended producer responsibility’ (EPR) system, which will penalise excessive packaging and encourage manufacturers to use materials that are easier to recycle.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is due to begin phasing in EPR next year and has said it will introduce a deposit return scheme in October 2025 – but supermarket chains have reportedly been lobbying to delay or weaken the measures. The Scottish government had been planning to introduce a deposit return scheme in August but this month delayed it until at least October 2025.

Meanwhile, the waste industry’s plans for decarbonising incineration focus on carbon capture and storage systems – but it wants huge subsidies to build them and glosses over the fact that many incinerators are far from any proposed pipeline for transporting carbon to long-term storage sites.

Speaking to openDemocracy, Colin Church, chair of the Green Alliance Circular Economy Task Force, said: “If the UK is serious about net zero, we need to stop releasing carbon dioxide from this plastic. We already know how to do this – putting less plastic in the waste in the first place, and then taking out what ends up there before incineration.

“We don’t need to wait another decade or more for the deployment of carbon capture technology, especially as that is not going to work for every waste incinerator. And until we do this, calling energy from waste ‘green energy’ is misleading greenwashing.”

Hayler of the ESA said the waste industry is “committed to try to decarbonise everything by 2040”, adding that key measures to achieve that included stopping the incineration of plastic and installing carbon capture and storage facilities at incinerators.

Asked about his members’ misleading claims, Hayler said: “It's absolutely right to say [energy from incinerators] is partially renewable.”

He added: “From the perspective of waste treatment, they are low carbon in that for every tonne of mixed waste that goes to one of these plants, you save about 100 kilograms of CO2 relative to that same black bag going to landfill.”