Dr Dick Van Steenis influence
What influence has doctor Dick van Steenis had on the incineration debate?
How far are we in Brighton and Hove from having the ideal waste system?
2025 follow-up to his talk at the Brighthelm Centre on 19 July 2006:
Dr Dick Van Steenis - Will waste be the death of us? - A medical perspective.
The Waste Hierarchy: Ideal future waste system 2025.
What's changing in Brighton & Hove?
Dr Dick van Steenis (often “Dr Dick Van Steenis”), a retired GP and anti-incineration campaigner, has had a noticeable influence on the public debate in the UK around incineration / energy-from-waste (EfW) plants — especially in raising health concerns, influencing public inquiries, and helping mobilise opposition in several cases. Below is a summary of his main contributions, claims, and how they’ve played out (strengths, criticisms, limits).
Who he was & what he claimed
- Van Steenis was a medical doctor with experience in toxicology.
- His activism focused on health risks of incinerators: emissions of particulates (especially PM2.5, PM1), heavy metals, dioxins, etc. He claimed these could contribute to increased rates of asthma, cancer, heart disease, infant mortality, lower IQs in children, and other health burdens.
- He argued that modern regulations weren’t stringent enough, especially in regard to the physical properties of emissions (particle size etc.) and their cumulative impacts.
- He promoted alternative technologies to incineration (or to “traditional/incumbent” EfW incineration), such as plasma arc gasification.
1. Public campaigns / local opposition
- He’s been involved in several local opposition movements. For instance, opposition to an incinerator at Javelin Park, near Haresfield: in a local meeting, he argued that proposed incinerator emissions were dangerously lax and that health risks were downplayed.
- In Oxfordshire / Ardley, he was quoted warning of increases in heart attacks, cancer, and children’s IQ being lowered.
- In Jersey (La Collette), he warned that breast cancer rates, infant mortality, asthma etc would likely go up.
2. Evidence / Public Inquiries
- He has given evidence to UK select committees and public inquiries on air quality and health.
- His submissions often emphasise that the public health burden is under-estimated, and that regulators don’t always take into account subtle or cumulative risk (including small particle sizes, or synergy between pollutants).
3. Shaping policy conversation
- His arguments have helped bring health risk issues more fully into planning debates. For example, local councils and planning authorities have had to respond to concerns about emissions, monitoring, health impact assessments, etc.
- He seems to have pushed for tighter regulation, more rigorous health impact assessments, more transparency, and scrutiny.
4. Mobilising public awareness & concern
- His speeches, letters, and appearances raise public awareness. The role of such “expert voices” is critical in shaping perceptions among communities considering incinerator projects.
- He’s frequently referenced by local media, campaign groups, action groups opposing incinerator proposals. So his influence is not purely academic but quite practical in activism.
Criticisms & Limitations
Van Steenis’ views are not universally accepted, and there are several criticisms / counterpoints that appear in the public debate:
- Others (industry, regulators, EfW proponents) argue that modern incinerators are well-regulated and that emissions are kept below harmful levels. They contend that the evidence van Steenis uses is not always peer-reviewed or is extrapolated beyond what the data supports.
- Sometimes local authorities or companies say that van Steenis presents worst-case or speculative risk rather than demonstrating proven health impact in situ.
- The regulatory framework in the UK and EU includes limits on key emissions (dioxins, particulates etc.), requirement for environmental/health impact assessments, monitoring. Proponents say that these mitigate many of the risks.
- Also, causal attribution is always difficult: proving that an incinerator causes specific health outcomes is hard, especially when effects may be small, over long time periods, and mixed with other pollution sources.
Overall Influence & Legacy
Putting it all together, Dr Van Steenis’ influence has been significant in these ways:
- Shifting the burden: He helped shift some of the burden of proof to incinerator proponents to more fully account for health risks, including longer-term and low-dose exposures.
- Raising regulatory/monitoring scrutiny: Because of his claims, planning decisions have sometimes been delayed, scrutinised more closely; public inquiries have had to address health evidence more carefully.
- Empowering community opposition: Local opposition groups have had a credible medical/health expert to call upon; this gives such groups more leverage.
- Framing alternative debate: By pushing alternatives (e.g. plasma gasification), by emphasising particle size and cumulative exposure, etc., he broadened public policy discussion beyond “incineration vs landfill” to include questions about technology, regulation, and health trade-offs.
- Legislative / policy framing: His evidence has featured in parliamentary reports and in debates over European directives (such as waste incineration directive, emission limits, etc.). For example, the House of Lords report on European Communities notes Dr van Steenis among several health-concerned witnesses.
Summary: What he didn’t do or couldn’t always do
- He did not generally succeed in proving universally that incinerators are unsafe in all cases — many planning permissions still go ahead; many incinerators get built.
- His evidence is sometimes disputed or countered by studies or experts with different conclusions.
- Regulatory change has been incremental; public health standards have improved, but many of the risks claimed (e.g. long-term cancer risk, lower IQs) remain contested or uncertain scientifically.
Ideal waste system: waste hierarchy
1 (top priority) to 6 (last resort)
1. Prevention & Reduction (Top Priority)
- Design out waste: durable, repairable, modular products.
- Packaging reduction & reuse schemes.
- Consumer behaviour: refill systems, bans on unnecessary single-use plastics.
2. Reuse & Repair
- Repair hubs and reuse networks (furniture, electronics, clothing).
- Sharing models: tool libraries, leasing instead of ownership.
3. Recycling & Resource Recovery
- Mechanical recycling for clean, sorted plastics, metals, paper, glass.
- Advanced (chemical) recycling for plastics that mechanical methods can’t handle.
- Industrial symbiosis: waste as feedstock for other industries.
4. Biological Treatment (for organics)
- Anaerobic digestion (AD): turns food/green waste into biogas + digestate.
- Composting: for smaller/community-scale organics.
5. Residual Waste Treatment (minimising what’s left)
- Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT): extracts recyclables, stabilises what remains.
- Gasification / Pyrolysis (including Plasma Arc Gasification):
- Possible role for high-value, hard-to-manage waste streams.
- Works best for hazardous waste, medical waste, or refuse-derived fuel (RDF) rather than raw household waste.
Based on the evidence, Dr Dick van Steenis likely overstated the role of plasma gasification (PAG) in future waste management, although his promotion of it fits his broader stance against conventional incineration.
6. Disposal (Last Resort)
- Incineration with energy recovery (EfW): only for residuals that can’t be reused, recycled, or treated otherwise.
- Landfill: for inert residues only (e.g., ash, slag, stabilised waste).
How well do we fare with the waste hierarchy?
To what extent do Brighton & Hove's recycling rates conform with the "ideal future waste system" now in 2025?
ANSWER: very poorly compared with the recycling rates in Oxford UK and Newport Wales.
| City | % recycled, reused or composted |
| Brighton & Hove | 27%-28% |
| Oxford UK | 48%-57% |
| Newport Wales | 71.45% |
72-73% of Brighton & Hove's waste goes to the Newhaven incinerator. Incineration is a barrier to the circular economy.
Brighton & Hove’s most recent figures suggest that about 27-28% of household/domestic waste is recycled, reused or composted. In the year to March 2024: 103,586 tonnes of household waste collected; of that, 28,406 tonnes was recycled/composted/reused → ~27%. In 2022-23, the recycling/composting/reuse rate was similarly ~28%. Less than 1% of Brighton & Hove’s domestic waste goes to landfill; most non-recycled waste is sent to the incinerator for energy recovery.
What's changing in Brighton & Hove?
Extension of the Council's recycling offer
Residents will be able to put a wider range of materials in their household kerbside or communal mixed recycling collections (to be phased in up until March 2026).
See summary of
What you can and can't recycle in Brighton and Hove.
New materials accepted from 30th June 2025 include:
- Plastic pots used for yoghurt, prepared fruit, mini desserts, soup and cosmetics (such as skin cream and hair gel)
- Plastic tubs that contained margarine, chocolate, pasta sauces, ice cream, baked goods, such as bite-sized flapjacks, and laundry powder
- Plastic trays or bowls – these include meat and fish trays, ready-meal bowls or trays, snack and salad containers, fruit punnets, containers for fresh or prepared vegetables as well as cakes and pastries, also trays used inside boxes of chocolates
We’ll be adding food & drink cartons and aluminium foil soon, but please don’t put these out with your recycling for now as they will contaminate the load.
When the new service is rolled out as part of the council’s waste contract, these items can all go in with the mixed recycling.
Separate Brighton and Hove City Council food waste collections to be phased in from the autumn up until March 2026.
In Brighton & Hove, about 30-31% of the “black bag” or residual waste (i.e. what households throw away rather than recycling) is food & drink waste.
For a trial period Cityclean will take food waste collections directly to the composting facility near Lewes, avoiding Hollingdean's Waste Transfer Station which has an odour management problem. However, this assumes that residents will comply with separate food waste collections.
What will happen if residents continue to mix food waste with black bag waste?
What is the likely rate of compliance in Brighton and Hove?
Answers to these questions suggest that initially only about 25% of food waste will be removed from the Hollingdean Waste Transfer Station, though acknowledgement that none of it is meant to go there is progress and directly addresses our concerns.
This page was last updated by Ted on 16-Sep-2025