Communities Against the Lough Neagh Incinerator

• The highly toxic fly ash must be safely disposed of. This usually involves additional waste miles and the need for specialist toxic waste landfill elsewhere, sometimes with concerns for local residents. This has been the case in Bishops Cleeve, Gloucestershire, UK.^{[20] [21]}
  
• There are still concerns by many about the health effects of dioxin and furan emissions into the atmosphere from old incinerators; especially during start up and shut down events, or where filter bypass events are required.
  
• Incinerators emit varying levels of heavy metals such as vanadium, manganese, chromium, nickel, arsenic, mercury, lead, and cadmium, which can be toxic at very minute levels.
  
• Incinerator Bottom Ash (IBA) has high levels of heavy metals with ecotoxicity concerns if not reused properly. Some people have the opinion that IBA reuse is still in its infancy and is still not considered to be a mature or desirable product, despite additional engineering treatments.^{[citation needed]}
  
• Alternative technologies are available or in development such as Mechanical Biological Treatment, Anaerobic Digestion (MBT/AD), Autoclaving or Mechanical Heat Treatment (MHT) using steam or Plasma arc gasification PGP, or combinations. Erection of incinerators block out the development and introduction of other emerging technologies.
  
• Building and operating an incinerator requires long contract periods to recover initial investment costs, causing a long term lock-in. Incinerator lifetimes normally range from 25-30 years.
  
• Incinerators produce fine particles and ultra fine particles in the furnace. Even with modern particle filtering of the flue gases, approximately 1/500 of these (by mass) are emitted to the atmosphere. PM_2.5 is not separately regulated in the European Waste Incineration Directive, even though they are repeatedly correlated spatially to infant mortality in the UK (M.Ryan's ONS data based maps around the EfW/CHP waste incinerators at Edmonton, Coventry, Chineham, Kirklees and Sheffield) ^[22][23][24] Under WID there is no requirement to monitor stack top or downwind incinerator PM2.5 levels. ^[25] Several European doctors associations (including cross discipline experts such as physicans, environmental chemists and toxicologists) in June 2008 representing over 33,000 doctors wrote a keynote statement directly to the European Parliament citing widespread concerns on incinerator particle emissions and the absence of specific fine and ultrafine particle size monitoring or in depth industry/ government epidemilogical studies of these minute and invisible incinerator particle size emissions. ^[26]
  
• Local communities are often opposed to the idea of locating incinerators in their vicinity. (The Not In My Back Yard phenomenon). Studies in Andover, Massachusetts strongly correlated 10 % property devaluations with close incinerator proximity ^[27].
  
• Prevention, waste minimisation, reuse and recycling of waste should all be preferred to incineration according to the waste hierarchy. Supporters of zero waste consider incinerators and other waste treatment technologies as barriers to recycling and separation beyond particular levels, and that waste resources are sacrificed for energy producion.^[28][29][30]
  
• A recent Eunomia report found that under some circumstances and assumptions, incineration causes less CO₂ reduction than other emerging EfW and CHP technology combinations for treating residual mixed waste.^[14]. The authors found that CHP incinerator technology ranked 19 out of 24 combinations; being 228% less efficient than the ranked 1 Advanced MBT maturation technology; or 211% less efficient than plasma gasification/autoclaving combination ranked 2.
  
• Some incinerators are architecturally monstrous and ugly. In many countries they require a visually intrusive chimney stack.

Quote relating to the fire at Fibrothetford chicken-litter waste incinerator near Thetford. Area manager Terry Larkowsky, who was in charge of the incident, said: "If you imagine the Alps and the Andes sculpted out of poultry litter, that's what it is like in the fuel hall. They were very large piles.”  - sign our petition and stop this development in Northern Ireland