Medact North East joins SINE to push Newcastle Town Council to withdraw their involvement with new waste incinerator
On Saturday 14th September, well being execs and contributors of Prevent Incineration North East amassed out of doors Newcastle Civic Centre to protest the Tees Valley Power Restoration Facility (TVERF), a proposed waste incinerator close to Grangetown in Redcar. The incinerator poses serious well being and environmental dangers, and would motive the best hurt to communities who already undergo disproportionately because of the local weather disaster.
An open letter signed by means of 180 native well being staff was once passed into Newcastle town council within the Newcastle Civic Centre, to the backdrop of a side road theatre bringing the waste incinerator to lifestyles, contributors of Stop Incineration North East (SINE) donning bin luggage and a menacingly toothed-incinerator, apt when incinerators are in-built low revenue spaces that are already on the sharp finish of well being inequalities. Whilst to a couple in all probability a unusual sight on an in a different way sunny Saturday morning, a far much less jarring sight than what the proposed incinerator would do to a neighborhood.
The open letter was once on no account the primary time this dialog has been had with Newcastle Town Council. The vows to by no means once more burn waste, following the Byker incinerator scandal the place Newcastle Town Council was once prosecuted for its dealing with of poisonous ash from an area incinerator, then again, have transpired to be resoundingly hole.
The Redcar Incinerator would no longer best irritate air high quality but additionally is more likely to lower recycling charges and build up visitors, noise, and CO2 emissions within the area. There’s no secure stage of publicity to pollution and simply 100 miles around the border, in Scotland, incinerators have already been banned.
Photograph: Mike Rabley
Photograph: Mike Rabley
Incineration and related pollution have opposed well being affects around the lifecourse, impacting the whole thing from kid well being – air pollution seeing babies born with decrease delivery weights and better charges of bronchial asthma – to heart problems, cancers and dementia in older lifestyles. The adverse affect of incineration affects the whole thing from psychological well being, with upper charges of despair, to reproductive well being, impacting fertility, to wider problems akin to charges of violence – highlighting how problems such because the Redcar incinerator are related to all people as healthcare execs, irrespective of our specialities.
Waste incinerators in the United Kingdom are thrice much more likely to be situated in low-income communities – this act of environmental injustice thus in detail intertwined with wider social injustices, emphasising how over and over again well being inequalities within the North East don’t seem to be inevitable, however a mindful made from coverage alternatives. Certainly, Grangetown is likely one of the maximum disadvantaged spaces within the North East – and the entire nation – and already has some of the best charges of deaths because of respiration illness and decrease lifestyles expectancy, and no more time lived in well being, with girls in Redcar having a median wholesome lifestyles expectancy of best 52.2 years. The share in their lives lived in unwell well being will best magnify if the waste incinerator have been to move forward.
As well being execs, we will have to carry the alarm at the well being and environmental affects that have an effect on the communities that we serve within the North East, and as well being inequalities widen, our legal responsibility to sufferers will have to lengthen past the health center ward.
Medact North East and SINE’s protest on 14th September 2024 was once coated by means of native press together with the Newcastle Chronicle and Hexham Courant. The tale was once covered nationally by the BBC, in addition to by means of broadcast on BBC Radio Tees, BBC Radio Newcastle, and ITV Tyne Tees.
