A Healthier Vision for Stoke’s Waste and Energy
A Clean Air Alternative to the Proposed Hanford Incinerator Expansion
 

📌 The Situation: Two Issues Stoke Must Solve

Our city is currently at a critical crossroads. The Council faces two major infrastructure challenges:
 

1. The General Waste Problem: Managing roughly 70,000 tonnes of local household black-bin rubbish every year.
    

2. The Empty Pipes: The Council spent millions laying 4 kilometres of underground heating pipes across our city centre, Stoke town, and Shelton. This District Heating Network (DHN) sits completely empty because the initial deep geothermal drilling project collapsed years ago. The city needs a heat source to plug into these pipes.
    

🛑 The Council’s Proposed Plan: "Hanford 2.0"

To solve both problems at once, the Council has issued a £1.1 billion long-term contract tender to build a massive, expanded new incinerator at the Hanford site. They intend to burn rubbish to heat the empty pipes.
 

Why this plan fails our community:

• A 40-Year Health Lock-In: It binds Stoke-on-Trent to a waste-burning strategy for up to four decades. Even with modern filters, incinerators release ultra-fine particles and toxins into our local air.
   

• Targeting Vulnerable Lungs: Our city already has disproportionately high rates of asthma and lung conditions. Adding a massive, permanent regional combustion source directly downwind of our homes creates an unfair and unnecessary risk to our respiratory health.
   

• Importing Other People's Rubbish: Stoke only produces 70,000 tonnes of general waste. To make this giant plant profitable for a private operator, it will handle up to 290,000 tonnes. This means importing up to 76% of our rubbish from across Staffordshire, turning Stoke into a regional dumping ground and destroying incentives to recycle.

 

 

🌱 A Healthier Alternative: Clean Heat & High-Tech Recycling

We do not have to choose between leaving our expensive heating pipes empty and harming the lung health of our children and grandchildren. Modern, non-polluting solutions can separate waste treatment from heat generation entirely (there are already working examples in the UK as well as elsewhere). For instance:
 

1. The Waste Solution: Automated Sorting (No Burning)

Instead of building a giant bonfire, Stoke could invest in a high-tech Mechanical Automated Sorting Facility.

• Advanced AI and robotic sensors pull recyclable plastics and metals straight out of our black bags before disposal.

• This slashes the volume of waste, makes money by selling clean recyclables back to manufacturers, and keeps the burning process out of Stoke's urban atmosphere entirely.
   

2. The Heating Solution: Hidden Clean Energy (Zero Air Pollution)

To heat the empty underground pipes safely without a chimney stack, we can tap into low-risk, clean energy sources already sitting right beneath our feet:

• Mine Water Energy: Stoke’s abandoned coal mines are flooded with water naturally warmed to 15°C–20°C by the Earth. Using shallow, low-risk heat pumps, we can draw this water up, multiply the heat cleanly using green electricity, and warm our city's pipes. (This is already working successfully in Gateshead).

• Water Source Heat Pumps: We can place industrial heat pumps into the River Trent or our local canal networks, cleanly compressing ambient water heat to safely warm the city network with zero local air emissions.
  
   

📢 What We Are Asking For

We want the Council to pause this 40-year incinerator project and commission a proper feasibility study into an automated recycling facility combined with zero-emission mine-water and river heat pumps.
 

Our lungs have suffered enough from generations of industrial air pollution.
It is time to look forward, not backward.