SOME 100 climate activists have shut down an Aberdeen incinerator in the heart of the city’s most deprived community, Torry.
A £150 million waste-to-energy plant sited just 300 yards from a primary school and burning a staggering 150,000 tonnes of unrecycleable waste a year was brought to a standstill on Saturday as Climate Camp Scotland and local campaigners stood together on the picket line.
Demanding an end to private profiteering from pollution, the residents renewed their opposition to the plant, a joint project between Acciona Ltd, its operator Indaver UK, and Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire and Moray councils which opened, to local fury, in December despite a national moratorium on new incinerators.
Karryghan, an Edinburgh climate activist who joined the action, said:
Whether this is the Scottish government missing its ‘world-leading’ targets, or the continuing oil and gas projects from UK governments, this system makes promises but never puts words into action.
The system that allows energy companies to make record billion-pound profits from polluting communities like Torry must be replaced. A fair world must have the interests of everyday people and their communities at the heart of it.
Ishbel Shand, a local resident engaged in a battle to stop the community’s sole remaining green space, St Fittick’s Park, being lost to oil-industry billionaire Sir Ian Wood’s Scottish and UK government-backed greenwashing plans for a carbon capture and grey hydrogen “energy transition zone,” also joined the picket.
She said:
This incinerator is a grotesque building, squatting in our community like a great cockroach and converting non-renewable natural resources into toxic ash and carbon dioxide.
It is a malign symbol of the rampant consumerism that is destroying our planet. This isn’t energy from waste: it exists to waste energy.
How on Earth did this ever become acceptable?
Fellow picket Scottish Green MSP Maggie Chapman said:
For decades, Torry has borne the brunt of industrial development without seeing the benefits.
Old Torry was demolished for oil and gas developments in the ’70s. Torry lost its beach at Nigg Bay to the south harbour.
And it has to deal with the waste from the city and the shire, with the incinerator and sewage works looming over communities.
With life expectancy in Torry more than 10 years lower than elsewhere in Aberdeen, this inequality and injustice must stop.
We need an end to private profiteering and fossil capitalism. Torry needs justice.