Tyre-burning power plant generates row

and councillors are at odds over safety

ELM Energy and Recycling (UK) Ltd call it a ''tyres to electricity''

plant. Locate in Scotland sees it as a power station burning a fossil

fuel which happens to be rubber and is not dissimilar to diesel.

Residents in East Kilbride see it as an incinerator burning tyres which

will emit pollutants they would much rather not have.

In terms of rows that have hit East Kilbride in its relatively short

history, this probably ranks as one of the biggest.

The Labour-controlled district council, after examining the planning

application for the plant, sees no environmental or public health

grounds to oppose it -- but the local constituency Labour Party and East

Kilbride's Labour MP, Adam Ingram, disagree and are urging the

councillors to withdraw their support.

Strathclyde East MEP Ken Collins lives in East Kilbride and is

chairman of the European Parliament's environment committee. While

determined not to become embroiled in a local planning row, he has

called for an environmental impact assessment to be carried out. That

has been accepted and will probably be completed by late summer. Most

expect it to settle the argument, but some residents claim that the

assessment will examine only the reliability of the proposed plant, not

its location, near Hairmyres Hospital and residential areas, the basis

of their opposition. This argument, as they say, could run and run.

What precisely is being proposed? Elm Energy, a UK subsidiary of an

American power generation company based in Indiana, is already building

a 30 megawatt electricity generating station to burn 100,000 tonnes of

waste tyres a year in Wolverhampton.

The East Kilbride plant would be an electricity generating station

fuelled by 18,000 to 20,000 tonnes of waste tyres per year, and zinc

oxide, steel wire, and sulphur (in the form of gypsum) would be

collected from the incinerated tyres for recycling.

It would appear, therefore, that the plant is both a power station and

an incinerator, producing some recycled by-products. But the crucial

word in this increasingly heated public debate appears to be

''incinerator''.

Lanarkshire Health Authority has offered no objection to the proposal,

so long as it operates within legal guidelines. The Institute of

Occupational Medicine, asked by Lanarkshire Development Agency to report

on possible health effects and nuisance to the nearby population,

concluded: ''The clear message from papers, reports, and meetings with

enforcing officers and researchers in the UK and USA is that controlled

burning of tyres to produce energy is a good environmental option for

tyre disposal. Burning tyres in a controlled manner with good stack

emission control produces low levels of emissions and black smoke and

foul smells are not emitted.''

Their report continued: ''We are confident that the East Kilbride

plant will fit this pattern. The furnace and ancillary equipment is

robust and controllable. The complete combustion in the furnace is a

major part of the emissions control. There are, in addition, two sets of

high-efficiency filters and an acid gas scrubber for sulphur dioxide and

hydrogen chloride. Dispersion modelling of stack emission indicates that

the plant will not have a significant effect on the local environment.''

However, the IOM adds one rider. It recommends that the emission

limits for heavy metals from the East Kilbride stack should be one

hundredth of those set by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Pollution for

tyre burning plants.

These concerns on heavy metal emissions -- principally arsenic,

cadmium, and nickel -- are echoed by Dr Henry Gray, an East Kilbride

resident who is also a specialist in respiratory diseases at Glasgow

Royal Infirmary. The effect of heavy metal emissions is, he says, an

imponderable, although he claims that it may be equivalent to the effect

of a person smoking one cigarette every day.

His main contention, however, is that the sulphur dioxide emissions

from such a plant could be harmful to asthmatics and others with

respiratory problems and they could also cause asthma in young children.

Conscious that he is likely to be labelled a typical Nimby protester,

Dr Gray sent the Ove Arup consultants report, commissioned by Elm

Energy, which detailed the probable emissions from the East Kilbride

plant, to Dr Jon G. Ayres, a consultant in respiratory disease at

Birmingham's Heartlands Hospital and a member of the Department of

Health's committee on the medical effects of air pollution.

In his reply to Dr Gray, Dr Ayres said there was evidence that

hospital admissions for asthma and lung function of asthmatics

correlated with sulphur dioxide levels that were well below EC

guidelines.

He added: ''I would therefore support your contention that this (the

proposed East Kilbride plant) is likely to result in a deleterious

effect on the local population in East Kilbride, particularly in view of

the somewhat insensitive positioning of the recycling facility in

relation to a hospital which is going to be treating patients who are

likely to be more susceptible to the acute effects of poor air

quality.''

For Mrs Anne Evans, managing director of Elm Energy, it has proved a

highly frustrating exercise. Privately, some believe that both Elm

Energy and Lanarkshire Development Agency, who along with Locate in

Scotland attracted the company to East Kilbride, have fallen down in

both their public consultation and their public relations.

Mrs Evans admits that pushing through the planning application for the

bigger plant in Wolverhampton was easier, partly because she lived there

and could watch developments.

However, she has formed a somewhat jaundiced view of Scotland on her

numerous trips to East Kilbride.

''The Midlands is Camelot compared with here,'' she said last week.

''What's happened here has been remarkable. It's a democracy and the

public are the government, but we are not breaking the law. There is a

law which says you have to stay within certain limits, but we are well

below that, plus we are putting in monitoring that is not required --

and we are being told we are bad.''

''If I am asked about how I got on in Scotland -- well, I got kicked

around in Scotland. Not by Locate in Scotland, nor the East Kilbride

Development Corporation, which didn't want to look at our planning

application until its consultants had looked at it and said it was

clean. And East Kilbride has a council that is very worried in terms of

environmental awareness and making sure that this does everything that a

good industrial process does. But they have local people saying we

happen not to like this, even on an industrial park.''

Mrs Evans added that the plant represented a #13m investment and would

provide 35 direct jobs as well as many other indirect jobs. The other

side of the coin, she said, was that Elm Energy, unlike some companies,

was prepared to take a site beside the council's own refuse transport

section.

''I think that was a motive for East Kilbride -- we were someone who

would be a neighbour to their worst thing.''

Councillor Colin Robb, leader of East Kilbride District Council, is

awaiting the result of the environmental impact assessment, and will

continue to support the application so long as it is given a clean bill

of health. He is unwilling to appease local residents by opting for a

different site, saying that such a move would ''imply there was

something wrong with the technology or that we were seriously concerned

about the levels of emissions''.

He emphasises the stringent conditions the council has insisted upon,

including a land-line link from the plant to the council's environmental

health department for monitoring.

Those in favour of the plant tend to see the row as something of a

public perception problem. However, academics who have studied the

environmental effects of incinerators -- and they include this type of

tyres-to-energy plant in that category -- are unwilling to dismiss

public fears quite so easily.

Mr Colin Clark, a lecturer in Strathclyde University's department of

civil engineering and environmental health, said: ''One of the problems

with incinerators is not that we can or cannot control the emissions

that we know about . . . it is the X compounds that we have yet to

identify as coming out of incinerators, regardless of what kind of

incinerators.''

He said, however, that the public had to be sensible about the issue

and draw the line somewhere. In the case of clinical waste, for example,

there was no practical alternative to incineration.

Dr Graham Watt, of the department of public health medicine at Glasgow

University, puts municipal or clinical waste incinerators in a different

category from a tyre-to-energy plant, partly because it is recognised

that it is a community's civic responsibility to deal with its own

clinical or municipal waste.

''The problem here,'' he said, ''is that there is no possibility of

local ownership. It is an uphill argument to try to win public

acceptance for an incinerator that does not have to be in the area.''

For him, one of the most important issues to be considered is the

competence of the operator, and who is going to police the environmental

controls, particularly if the local authorities do not retain

responsibility for monitoring pollution once the Scottish Environmental

Pollution Agency is set up.

He said: ''One of the difficulties in granting applications for any

type of incinerator plant is that in order to get the thing built there

are certain requirements, such as an environmental impact assessment. It

is not difficult to make the case on paper that it will be regulated

safely. The worry is that it will not turn out like that. It is a bit

like a motor car -- the key factor is the driver, not the motor car.

That is what makes it dangerous, not the specifications under the

bonnet.''

There is a law which says you have to stay within certain limits, but

we are well below that, plus we are putting in monitoring that is not

required -- and we are being told we are bad.