What did we learn from our campaign for Irvine Without Incinerators? 

By Veronika Liebscher, member of Irvine Without Incinerators 

May 2026 

Late last year, after five years of building, and nearly two full years of local protest, Oldhall Waste Incinerator in North Ayrshire were granted the licence to fire up. This is expected to happen this month.  

Had the local campaign group, Irvine Without Incinerators, small but fierce, not been there at all, the incinerator would still have been planned, built, and soon be burning thousands of tonnes of waste.  

But crucially very few local people would have heard about it, even less would have known what it means for the planet, and for the local population and environment.   

And unchallenged Doveryard who built it, Octopus Renewables who financed it, and North Ayrshire Council who granted planning permission might have gone on to think it was acceptable, maybe evenlaudable.  Instead of their greenwashing narrative, Irvine Without Incinerators work ensured Oldhall was labelled as a controversial project and made people question its worth to the local area. 

The developers thought it was acceptable to build an incinerator in a deprived part of the country; to bring additional traffic and pollution; to fail to solve local waste problems; to further endanger the health of a population whose healthy life expectancy is, unbelievably, 52; and spew out climate-changing gas emissions. 

Image: Members of Irvine Without Incinerators meet local MP Alan Gemmel to discuss the incinerator 

Besides that, we would have missed out on building connections within our community that will hopefully endure long beyond this campaign. 

We would not have been able to keep the project in the press; challenge it at every level; question the councillors who waved through the planning permission.  

We would not have learnt to challenge the representatives of the developer; the builder; and the PR company tasked with making it seem like a good idea.  We would never have known that the local florist’s son felt so strongly he wrote to the king, and had a reply!  

We would not have learnt all we now know. Of these things possibly the most important is to keep an eye on future planning permission requests and catch them early.   

It is still our belief that the decision to pass planning permission was made without any real understanding of the consequences. Once this decision was made, the power was handed from the local council,nominally controlled by the electorate, to a private company, in this case the developer.   

What else did we learn? 

• Meet regularly and encourage one another, keep good communications 

• Link up with other campaign groups 

• Contact all elected representatives, face to face if possible, including the community councils 

• Engage with the public at every opportunity – public meetings, street stalls, etc 

• Create press releases, with photos, at every opportunity and fire them off to anyone who may use them 

• Make opportunistic use of local events, such as election hustings 

• Use social media, but use paper leaflets, stickers and press too 

• Ask questions – question the ‘facts’ on the webpage, question the council, submit FOIs. 

• Accept help, e.g. from Friends of the Earth Scotland 

• Keep good records, so that when you write a summary you can remember and enumerate the many kindnesses and surprising positives the campaign brought. 

I resolve to do more of that last one next time! 

Top image: A delegation group from Irvine Without Incinerators deliver a letter to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency calling on the agency not to award a permit to the Oldhall incinerator