The more things change…

Some extracts from ‘The incineration of refuse is beautiful’: Torquay and the introduction of municipal refuse destructors [1] are reproduced below to demonstrate how opposition to incineration is as old as the technology itself.

The emergence of destructors in late nineteenth-century Britain was not an uncontested triumph for sanitary engineering. There are scattered accounts of opposition to both proposed and operating works.

Built in 1877, Birmingham’s destructor was one of the first. Located across a canal from the GeneralHospital, it generated sufficient complaints to shut down the plant. In what became a common pattern, the destructor was re-built to improve its performance, and re-opened ‘without complaint from the hospital’.43

In Bath, complaints about the destructor (built 1895) grew so strong by the turn of the twentieth century that the council demanded the engineering firm correct the nuisance.

The council of Scarborough was determined to remove the tips that blighted their seaside resort, but the destructor met with such fierce opposition that the plans for its construction had to be scrapped.44

J.E. Cooney, MOH for Fulham, cautioned readers of The Practitioner:
The suggestion of establishing a destructor in a parish sets all ratepayers up in arms, and gives rise to an outcry that cannot be resisted. In theory the incineration of refuse is beautiful, and it can be carried out fairly well in practice…Much of the evil may be due to carelessness or want of management, but whatever may be
the cause, the destructor has earned for itself a bad name with the public, and it is almost impossible to establish one within the precincts of a parish.45

A decade later, in 1904, engineer D.J. Ross advised the City of London that inevitable legal proceedings rendered the use of destructors an impracticable solution to refuse disposal, despite its sanitary superiority over alternative methods.46

The introduction of the destructor highlighted tensions between technocratic experts and local residents when municipalities confronted organized waste disposal in the late nineteenth century. Perhaps nowhere is this better illustrated than Torquay.

A petition signed by 70 residents of Torquay was submitted to The Lancet in 1902. Convinced that their health had been ‘injuriously affected by the smoke fumes and gases ejected from the [local] refuse destructor’, they requested the respected medical journal to send a ‘commission to inquire into the matters so vitally affecting the health of Torquay and to point out what measures must be taken to safeguard the purity of the air’.49

The resultant report sheds considerable light on the social, economic and intellectual factors surrounding the ‘refuse revolution’ of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. But the Torquay incident is insightful because it adds considerable complexity to the triumphal contemporary accounts of the successes of progressive science and technology.

Lurking just below the surface of these accounts of sanitary progress, there is evidence of opposition to the introduction of ‘destructors’. With more attention to local contexts, these narratives of opposition reveal a great deal about attitudes towards waste, its management, the environment, pollution and public health.

Ignited for the first time in September 1898, the Torquay destructor began to elicit complaints from neighbouring residents one year later. Torquay’s problems were compounded by an insufficient flow of waste. Consequently, in the absence of sufficient amounts of rubbish, the destructor was shut down for brief periods; on resumption, combustion was imperfect until temperatures rose. Similarly, Torquay’s unusually high concentration of organic refuse in its waste stream burdened the destructor with wet matter that was difficult to burn.68

By 1900, opposition had gathered pace. Often enveloped in black, brown and pearl-grey smoke, people lodged a litany of health complaints: choking sensations; irritation of the throat; nausea; sore gums; headaches; abdominal pains; vomiting and general malaise.69

T. Codrington, in his Report on the Destruction of Town Refuse (1888) for the Local Government Board, observed that destructors could produce ash, smoke and vapours with offensive smells. Mr Rimington, the borough analyst of Bradford, attempted to capture these obnoxious vapours in alcohol, and produced, he claimed, something that ‘when diluted, was in taste and smell not unlike Scotch whiskey [sic]’.70 In the form of gases, particulates and residual ash, incinerators can produce a toxic dram of pollution….

First introduced in the late nineteenth century, incineration remains the most contentious method of municipal waste disposal. Incinerators require initial high capital investment, and a skilled labour force to maintain them. Moreover, despite the pronouncements of nineteenth-century engineers, incinerators displace pollution rather than obliterate waste. And energy recovered from the heterogeneous fuel of rubbish struggles to be economically competitive.

Torquay’s early destructor experience demonstrates that many of the difficulties and challenges of incineration were present from the inception of the technology. Opposition to the operational destructor demonstrated that the effort to remove one environmental problem might introduce another.

Although recent debates on incineration have resonances of the past, they also introduce new complexities. Like the residents of Torquay earlier, twenty-first-century environmental activists object to the pollution and public health dangers arising from the incineration of rubbish. They, however, operate within a post-1960s environmentalist rubric that weds public health concerns to nature conservation and preservation in a global context. Whereas past discussions assessed the possible benefits arising from waste-to-energy, recent critics of incineration have complained that it detracts from the push for renewable energy sources.

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[1] Clark , J. F. M. (2007). “Torquay and the introduction of municipal refuse destructors.” Urban History 34(02): 255-277.

43 Codrington, Report on the Destruction of Town Refuse, 7–8; and Goodrich, Economic Disposal of Town’s Refuse, 100.
44 Goodrich, Economic Disposal of Town’s Refuse, 112, 14.
45 Cooney, ‘The disposal of town refuse’, 305–6.
46 ‘Refuse disposal problems’, 346.
49 ‘The destructor nuisance at Torquay’, The Lancet, 1 (25 Jan. 1902), 262.
68 ‘Town council meeting’, The Torquay Directory and South Devon Journal, 3 Oct. 1900, 5.
69 ‘The destructor nuisance at Torquay’, The Lancet, 1 (1 Feb. 1902), 335–6.
70 Codrington, Report on the Destruction of Town Refuse, 38–47 (38).