Annual meeting of North London Waste Authority shut down by musical demonstration, reports Josh Mellor, Local Democracy Reporter

Singing protestors furious about the Edmonton incinerator rebuild shut down a North London Waste Authority (NLWA) meeting yesterday.

Meeting for the first time since May’s local elections, the waste authority’s 14 members planned to re-elect a chair and vice chair, discuss the past year and scrutinise its waste reduction plans.

But around 20 protestors in attendance refused to stop singing and chanting lyrics such as “burning waste is killing me”, eventually leading to the meeting being held in private after NLWA board members escaped the demonstration in a lift.

NLWA has been subject to a long-running campaign against its plan to construct a new, larger Edmonton incinerator. A £1.2billion contract to rebuild it, together with the provision of new recycling facilities at Edmonton Eco Park, was awarded to Spanish firm Acciona at the start of this year. Construction is now underway at the site.

The current incinerator is the oldest of its kind in the UK and in increasingly poor condition, with a five-month “outage” of one of its turbines last year causing a £5.5million loss in productivity.

The campaigners in attendance at yesterday’s NLWA annual meeting began their noisy protest when it became clear that the authority’s 14 members, who represent seven boroughs in north and east London, intended to re-elect Clyde Loakes as chair for a 14th year.

Dorothea Hackman, of Extinction Rebellion Camden, urged NLWA members not to pick him again, arguing ten years as chair should be the “natural limit” to avoid the authority becoming “wedded” to past decisions and unable to listen to “legitimate and evidenced objections”.

She added: “The Edmonton incinerator might have seemed like a good idea in 2015, 2016 and possibly even 2017, but now in 2022 it is not a good idea and we need you to hear this.

“There are issues of misrepresentation about emissions and comparisons that say that burning plastic in incinerators is somehow better than landfill – which it isn’t.

“We are in a position with the climate emergency where we want to stop the manufacture of plastics altogether; you should not be building an incinerator but a proper waste recycling facility.”

During a short debate, Haringey councillor Isidoros Diakides appeared open to a review of the rules around NLWA’s leadership but spoke positively of Cllr Loakes’s “many years of dedicated service”.

The protest group then began singing lyrics such as “stop, pause and review, do not elect Clyde Loakes, take it over,” until the meeting was adjourned.

Minutes later members attempted to re-enter the meeting room but were unable to stop the protestors, led by a singer called Marcus, from following them back in.

The meeting eventually resumed in a private room of Camden Council’s office building, where Cllr Loakes was elected chair and Islington’s Rowena Champion and Hackney’s Mete Coban were elected as deputy chairs.

Following the meeting an NLWA spokesperson said: “NLWA has always welcomed and encouraged residents to make deputations at our meetings, however shutting down a meeting and preventing democratic processes calls into question the real motives of protestors.”

The seven boroughs represented by the NLWA – Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey, Islington and Waltham Forest – have a combined household recycling rate of 28.7%, rising only 0.2% since last year.

Haringey’s Mike Hakata asked whether the authority was “missing a trick” by not investing in technology that could sort more recycling from regular household waste.

Cllr Loakes accepted North London is “falling behind” with recycling rates but said the responsibility to encourage residents “starts in our respective boroughs”.

He added that government plans for a deposit return scheme, which would see people pay a small deposit for drinks that they receive back when they recycle the bottle or can, had been “delayed, delayed, delayed”.

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