28. Filming my Arguments
When Rechem’s incinerators were on the drawing board in the early 1970’s, the environment was hardly a priority in Britain and planning against atmospheric pollution had barely moved on from the Alkali Acts and smog control.When Europe in general woke up in the 1980’s, I felt that Britain’s pride in being different helped sustain both the emissions from our hazardous waste incinerators and the trade that attracted the waste. Fortunately fashions can change and by the early 1990’s environmentalism in Britain was no longer seen to be the cranky pursuit depicted by some of the British broadsheets at the time I was campaigning against Canadian toxic waste. Although the UK’s Environmental Protection Act wasn’t everything we wanted it to be, amongst the surge of environmental measures it contained was the principle of Integrated Pollution Control. When IPC eventually it came into practice, large combustion plants were priorities for the application of the new philosophy. As part of this fresh start on regulation, instead of leaning back on mysterious ancient laws, ReChem would now need to seek new approval by means of an Application for Authorisation. The detailed application would have to stipulate the chemicals likely to be contained in emissions and the way they would be controlled. After a honeymoon lasting nearly two decades, the incinerator was being railed in.Much of the previous regulatory baggage, including the licence that shielded the Pontypool incineration plant, would be washed away as the Inspectorate came out of the shadows.
In the early days of STEAM, the panel of international experts brought to Gwent for Llew Smith’s conference made the recommendation that ReChem’s static hearth furnace should be replaced by a more sophisticated rotary incinerator. Under the new Pollution Control provisions, when ReChem was given until October 1992 to apply for permission to continue in existence, a necessary condition of the application quickly became apparent.The reborn Pollution Inspectorate pre-emptively called time on the static hearth technology of the incinerator. Regional chief, Geoffrey Barnett, warned that the current method was unlikely to meet the requirements of the newly-fashioned concept of “Best Available Techniques”, which was replacing the more flexible “Best Practicable Means”. The fact that ReChem was not using the best available techniques had been central to my “second rate” criticism on BBC radio. In its new life, the body I had so often condemned for supporting the Pontypool process was now planting itself firmly on my side of the legal action.What I said on the radio in 1989 had then contradicted the establishment’s opinion of the plant. Now the technology once termed “first class” by the government’s Environment Secretary was officially obsolescent.Only beaten in importance by my prediction that contamination by Rechem would be confirmed, this turnabout in official opinion had been at the top of my list of items needed for my defence. The Inspectorate’s ultimatum to Rechem made a lot of work I’d done, on thermochemistry and bureaucratic bungling, redundant from my defence.However, should the next phase of the U.E.A. study be unable to pin the contamination firmly on Rechem I would still be short of what I thought was essential to succeed in court. With my court case still in the doldrums I then lowered my guard, as if to discover what fight was left in the company. This occurred when the days of television documentaries on the subject had long disappeared under the deluge of libel actions but when one very brave producer allowed me to test anew, the legality of my stance.
The progress towards a TV documentary of my own began when I was approached by the freelance film maker Chris Rushton, from Cardiff. Chris had an idea to get me to do a piece for Channel 4, in their prime-time Free 4 All series. The program’s concept was that with professional guidance and resources, ordinary people would produce and present topical documentary films. Typically each half-hour slot contained several short films on a variety of topics. John Samson, Director of the independent film production company FILMIT, came from London to meet me and Chris at the Kings Hotel in Newport, in the autumn of 1991. We talked at great length before John, brimming with enthusiasm, walked back across the road to the train station. On his return to London he secured the whole 30-minute, 8pm T.V. slot for our piece. It was a courageous coup, considering that two previous Channel 4 programmes had ended up on the wrong end of ReChem in Court.
In the enthralling project I had the freedom to decide the content, to write the script, to select filming locations and to assist in the editing. Director Chris acquired two fantastic researchers from Bristol and brought in all the necessary production resources. The film was to be for a general audience, so I made some excursions into areas of waste apart from the type for incineration. Continuing on from my presentation in Buxton, I wanted to use a range of examples to form generalisations about public and political perceptions of waste may be holding up to progress.One of those was that moving the waste was a solution in itself and another was the misconception that substances can be destroyed. I had ready-made examples of instances where, in solving the small problems of many people, the movement of waste actually created huge problems for a few. To counteract the fallacy of chemical destruction I wanted to put some simple school chemistry on TV.This would all help to explain why so much chemical waste found its home in South Wales.For much of the filming in December 1991 the weather was dominated by freezing fog and it was particularly cold in the Rhymney Valley when we were filming a stockpile of chemical drums, which the Council had been landed with responsibility for. In contrast with the distress over drums in one valley there was jubilation in another valley, when I told Ebbw Vale protestors that the reclaimed hillside used temporarily for the town’s garden festival would not now become a site for chemical waste processing. With a well-timed intervention during our exposure of the plan, the Council took action to stop it in its tracks. I illustrated another powerful waste campaign in Newport and I tried to show what may happen if you don’t watch what’s going on with waste and why Pontypool provided such a good lesson.
In the more personal and provocative side of my agenda for the film, I wanted to put across the reasons for my long-held belief that the Pontypool plant was bound to be emitting toxic chemicals although that hadn’t been confirmed. Yes, the University of East Anglia had now strongly suggested it but it was still a forbidden area for media lawyers and I knew the topic would be difficult to air.After producing over thirteen hours of film I went to a studio in Brixton to help select a half-hour’s worth and to try some accompanying music.When the television lawyers saw what I had produced it set alarm bells ringing and what I said about contamination in the film created a panic which came within a whisker of killing the programme. I was fully aware that the only other time I’d gone anywhere near this close to the line on TV was with Sky at Liverpool docks in 1989. Even then I couldn’t have said what I was about to say now, especially on a recorded programme. It came because of my industrial past.
When working at the aluminium factory, I was keen to reduce our employees’ exposure to noise. In my investigations I learned that the newly built Royal Mint, at Llantrisant, had excellent reputation for the soundproofing of coining presses, so I visited the Mint to investigate the success. I was suitably impressed, but something else about my visit must have made a subliminal impression because it flashed into my mind when planning the TV program. Harking back to my limited training in accountancy, in the TV film I wanted a way of illustrating a balance sheet of chemicals going in and out of the Pontypool plant. The Royal Mint took had mastered the auditing of materials and at the Mint they knew precisely what went in as raw materials for the coins, they tried not to lose anything in the process and then completed the equation by measuring with astonishing accuracy, what came out of the factory. When making my film, now around ten years after my visit to the Llantrisant, I telephoned the Mint, told them of my good impressions and asked if I could re-visit with a T.V. crew. I explained that my reason this time was to praise the superb accounting process on film and I was delighted when I was given the go ahead.I didn’t let on the accounting for metals and coins would be used to question the accounting for toxic materials at Rechem and the visit went without a hitch. The film clip was good and I made my point about ReChem not being able balance their inputs and outputs as precisely as the Royal mint did, even though the Pontypool plant was dealing with materials that were dangerous in tiny amounts. The implication intended was that if ReChem’s accounting was accurate enough it would inevitably record PCBs and dioxins coming out of the plant.
For a week before the January 9th showing of the programme I spent almost as much time teaching science to TV lawyer’s as I did teaching it to my pupils at school.As the scheduled broadcast approached publicity was building and so was the legal tension, which reached a climax way after midnight a couple of days before the screening. I could sense that the TV solicitors I was speaking to on the telephone weren’t just scared themselves but were reflecting the fears of those above them. For me the chemical accounting comparison was crucial to the program, but the immense resistance against using it to support the theory of contamination meant that I now had to produce a tentative legal defence for the channel, in preparation for what might happen.
In the film, following the clip of the Royal Mint and hoping to predispose the TV audience to the idea the toxic substances must be coming out of the plant, I told of the continuing controversy over PCBs in the environment near the incinerator.Of course, I was careful not to say that the PCB contamination had come from the plant.Instead I stood in the Caldicott’s garden with a duck egg in one hand and eyes toward the incinerator, saying: “. . . naturally, people are puzzled when the company is confident that the PCBs over here have nothing to do with the PCBs over there – but one thing is certain, that some of the world’s waste is escaping from the plant and it must be around here somewhere”It was only an hour or so before the 8pm scheduled time that a phone call confirmed that the programme had been cleared to go out. Its title was Toxic Waste: The New Alchemy and it began with me looking around the shelves at Currys electrical retailers, in Cardiff.I wasn’t getting at the company but just trying to illustrate a typical range of consumer products and their connection with chemical waste. By the time it ended the programme had extended to the flow of waste around the world and our campaign against it.
There was just a smattering of complaints amongst many complimentary messages and even a request from the production company for a short follow-up. It was to be an update on the Western Australian Waste.John Samson of FILMIT was overjoyed with the programmes impact. One of the few complaints that did come in was from ReChem’s new MD, David Wheeler. I actually felt sorry for his position on the receiving end when he had only just taken over at the top and I couldn’t help but respect the reasonable tone of his long letter, even if I didn’t agree with the substance the complaint. One of our differences lay in where he appeared not to acknowledge the importance of the U.E.A’s preliminary findings and instead continued to rely on the monitoring conducted by ReChem and HMIP. More importantly, there were no legal undertones in the letter and it was significant that the letter was from the M.D himself rather than the company’s solicitors.With an optimistic outlook I saw the letter as a sign from Shank’s new boss that a new era in public relations had begun.
My follow-up piece for TV was focussed on the proposal, from Carpentaria Environmental Services, to ship over 4000 containers of PCBs, solvents and pesticides from Western Australia to Pontypool. That piece went out on 16th January, a week after the first program and just after a sudden new development in which local sewage contamination was being linked to imported waste.
Because Rechem’s liquid effluent was piped to the treatment works at Ponthir, near my home, I had taken up the issue of sewage contamination many years before after seeing sewage sludge spread on fields near my home. Welsh Water was not overly concerned at the time. I was told that the sludge was no longer going to be used on farmland, but would be dumped in the Bristol Channel. My earlier hunch about sewage contamination was proved a worthy one when Wessex Water blew the whistle on its Welsh counterpart. In a convoluted process, Welsh Water’s sludge was being transported to England for mixing with Wessex Water’s sludge before being dumped in the Bristol Channel. Wessex discovered that some treated sewage from the Ponthir works was contaminated.A report before the National Rivers Authority said that the contamination in the sewage sludge sent to Wessex Water had come from ReChem’s Pontypool plant and that its origin was possibly Spanish hexachlorobenzene waste, a red list chemical. Unlike a previous account of contaminated sewage, this report was not suffocated by secrecy and it blossomed into something bigger.
With Australia in our mind, it was Europe that briefly commanded publicity about waste shipments. In a letter to Torfaen Borough Council in February, the Austrian Embassy, not Australian, announced that the country’s PCB shipments were being halted in response to Pontypool’s protests. Soon Belgium appeared to be emulating the Austrians, whilst at home the incinerator was emulating itself, when its stack started blowing orange again. The progress made with the European nations was acknowledged in Wales on Sunday when the newspaper contrasted Europe’s new responsiveness with a growing anti-British resistance amongst Australian politicians. A robust editorial retaliation was headed: “Let Aussies stew in their own waste”
In contrast with antagonistic politicians in Australia, there were some indications that the country’s ordinary people were on our side. Heather Peebles from Western Australia rang our own press people stressing that the Australian public should not be tarred with the same brush as the politicians. Then, there was some official atonement, when Llew Smith brought David Fisher the Agent General for Western Australia, to Gwent, where he played-down the attitude of his peers. He also agreed that he would not want to live near the Pontypool incinerator, before bowing-out of the issue and diplomatically resting on the absence of objections by the British Government. Our own government’s talk of self-sufficiency was sounding good but getting nowhere in the realities of the international waste trade. Australian waste contractor Carpentaria demonstrated that distance can foster ignorance when the company justified the proposed shipments to Pontypool by claiming that the unavoidable rubber-stamping by Torfaen Borough Council meant that the district’s residents approved of the shipments.Carpentaria also claimed that the levels of contamination around ReChem’s plant were nothing special and it was obvious that Australia’s Federal government liked to think the same. It was then that ReChem used its new catch-phrase – the “Rolls-Royce of incineration”, a term that would have greater resonance with distant Australians than with local residents.At such a distance it was hard work counteracting the propaganda that pervaded Australia and so it was always encouraging to find some Western Australians, such as ex-Pontypool man Phillip Bowyer, helping to do that.The type of official arrogance we first experienced at the Australian High Commission in London and which now we saw as an extension of the disdain we found for us within the country’s government. Luckily, on a wider scale, nationalistic attitudes were becoming increasingly isolated and in contrast with the antipodean antipathy there was compensation from closer quarters when Sweden followed Austria and Belgium in deciding to end toxic shipments to Pontypool.With absolutely no sign of such understanding on the other side of the world it looked increasingly likely that we would meet the West Australian waste somewhere on the East coast of England in the summer of 1992.