The Community Science Lab - sites of activity (3)
splott, Tremorfa, adamsdown and roath (STAR) wards, cardiff
© Nick Hacking
© Nick Hacking
© Nick Hacking
© Nick Hacking
Some residents of the STAR wards in South Central Cardiff have long expressed concerns about the history of environmental exposures linked to steel manufacture and waste disposal. The economic and social history is one of deindustrialisation after the rise and long decline of steelmaking in the area over the last 120 years. Expressed concerns regarding steel pollution include worries about airborne ferrous particles which may involve exposure to heavy metals in the air, in watercourses and in the soil.
Such worries meant that when a waste incinerator was proposed for the area in 2010 by UK-based waste disposal firm, Viridor, its presence was largely rejected by community members as a step backwards in terms of the cumulative impact on local environmental health. Despite Viridor's claims of stringent safety measures, the plant, which was built by 2015 and was running by 2017, still emits carbon dioxide and certain heavy metals into the local atmosphere from the incineration of household waste. At the time, the Wales Health Impact Assessment Support Unit (WHIASU) undertook a broadly-focused review of potential health impacts. Unfortunately, this evidence - based upon local expertise - was not considered by Cardiff Council's Planning Committee because Viridor filed a parallel planning application for a similar plant on the same site in Trident Park on Ocean Way.
The siting of the plant was controversial because it is so close to wards which feature extremely badly on Wales' Index of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD, 2021). In this context, it seems that not only is local expertise ignored but so too 'pollution follows the poor'. Local environmental groups have long sought to show that the plant burns waste which ought instead to be recycled. The plant also received £100m in public money from the Welsh Government so long as it could show that energy produced was truly 'renewable'. Friends of the Earth Cymru challenged this renewable designation in the courts but ultimately lost its case. Very much 'after the fact', public money has also gone into creating a district heating system linked to the Trident Park facility.
In this context, a degree of community science has arguably been revealed by the collective rejection of non-precautionary science in the governance of the steel and waste plants. I returned to take soundings from residents in 2024 and 2025 to see if further community science activity might be possible, as was seen with the HIA, and if not, why not?