Friday, 29 March 2024
News

Torq founder will everest by bike to highlight incineration damage

Torq founder Matt Hart will tomorrow ‘everest’ a summit overlooking the proposed site of a new industrial waste incinerator that would be visible from Rodney’s Pillar, the peak of his 1,000ft ascent (he’ll take it on 26 times in a row).

Hart will take on the 29,848 feet of climbing, setting off at 5AM tomorrow morning and expecting to finish at around 2AM on Sunday 23rd. He expects to average each loop in the space of 50 minutes.

Matt may need to consume a few of his own TORQ products in order to complete this challenge, but he is hoping to be cheered on by people in the local community and other cyclists who will join him for a few ups and downs to take his mind off the task at hand.

Hart says of the feat: “If this project were to go ahead, it would devastate the local community. It’s a beautiful rural area, the incinerator would be positioned right next to the school and HGV traffic would be carrying waste over huge distances through the local village creating noise, smells and pollution, not to mention the added CO2 emissions these vehicle miles would generate.”

He points to a recent Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on the subject as worthwhile watching for anyone concerned by the issue. It is worth mentioning that various incineration technologies exist, some capable of clean conversion of waste to energy, but the majority at present are deemed dirty in environmental terms and it is these that the documentary highlighted many councils have signed long-term contracts with.

As flagged by the documentary, councils are incentivised to burn waste, because it’s cheaper to do so than landfill. These plants have to keep the burners fed, so the plastics that consumers have spent time separating into domestic recycling bins gets incinerated too. Plastic is a fossil fuel, so once incinerated is not much different to burning oil or coal. There is evidence that such incinerators can produce emissions that are harmful to the health; every tonne of waste burned releases 1 tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere and sometimes higher.

If you agree incineration is not a good thing, you can lend support to Matt’s cause HERE where you can object in under 2 minutes the plans to build an incinerator at Buttington, near Torq HQ.

Torq products are carried by ZyroFisher in the UK.