About Us

Val Barton - Director and Company Secretary

On behalf of the community where she lived, St. Peter’s Residents Association, Val Barton first raised the issue of deposition of ash from Byker Energy from Waste Incinerator with the Environment Agency and with Newcastle & North Tyneside NHS Health Authority in 1999. She served on the Steering Group set up by the Health Authority to monitor the research to be carried out by Newcastle University. She was an allotment holder and represented 20 allotments in the east end of Newcastle on the Allotments Working Group. She was a founder member of CAIR (Newcastle’s Campaign Against the Incineration of Refuse) and of BaN Waste (Byker & Newcastle Waste Group) and sat on its Select Committee to hear expert evidence and make recommendations to the City Council for alternative waste strategies. In 2003 CAIR and BAN Waste were joint winners of the WWF Media Awards, CAIR for its media impact and BAN Waste for the quality of its reports. The same year BAN Waste won an environmental award presented by The Guardian. She was on the team for Newcastle upon Tyne’s Strategic Environmental Assessment & Health Impact Assessment on Waste Strategy.

Jeni Mackay - Director

Jeni has 10 years of environmental campaigning and activism with NGO's mainly Greenpeace UK, focusing mainly on renewable energy, forests, waste and toxics campaigns. She also helps to train other activists in Non Violent Direct Action and the legal consequences.
Working for SEPA on the National Waste strategy meant and increase in recycling and reuse for Jeni in 2000. But soon realised that Incineration was on the agenda as well as other waste disposal facilities. She then became heavily involved with the Greenpeace UK Zero Waste/Incinerator Buster campaign in 2001. This eventually led to Jeni leaving SEPA on moral grounds to seek out a career in promoting zero waste, recycling, and community waste initiatives. Jeni has also dabbled in chemical and toxic campaigning.

1997 - present Greenpeace UK, campaigning, activisim & training activists.
2000-2003 Scottish Environment Protection Agency - National Waste Strategy Team
2001- 2002 Greenpeace UK - Incinerator Buster Campaign
2003 - 2005 Community Recycling Network for Scotland
2005-2006 Friends of the Earth Scotland, Waste Consultant
2005 - Present Friends of the Earth Europe, Chemicals Campaigner, REACH
2006- Present Scotland up in Smoke, anti incineration/zero waste promotion campaign.
2007 Scottish Green Party Edinburgh Local Council Candidate for the 2007 elections.

Ralph Ryder - Director

Ralph's first experience of incineration was when he found himself in the middle of the grounding plume from a hazardous waste incinerator shortly after it began operations in 1974. He was appalled at the apathy exhibited by politicians and regulatory bodies to complaints by residents and workers of health problems they attributed to the incinerators emissions. Despite literally hundreds of complaints over a 14 year period the County council refused to do any research into the health complaints and in 1988 agreed to the building of another incinerator with three times the capacity of the one causing the problems. Ralph decided then that no other community was going to be treated in this fashion and began speaking of his experiences to groups living with existing facilities or facing planning applications for incinerators. He is coordinator of the national network Communities Against Toxics and a founder member of the Chartist, the International Persistent Organic Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN. Europe) and Health Care Without Harm (Europe). He is also the Western Europe Regional Node for the Global Anti-Incineration Alliance/Global Alliance for Incineration Alternatives (GAIA).

Arnold Woolley, DipIM, MCMI - Director

Arnold became an environmentalist when he first traded shots with ivory poachers on the shores of Lake Nyasa in Africa in 1961. After that it was the steady, if unspectacular, routine policing of illegal logging, mining and hunting of rare game that instilled in him a keen awareness of the need to conserve and properly sustain both our natural and man-made environments.
Returning to the UK in 1984, Arnold lived a relatively uncomplicated existence until he became a Town Councillor in 1994 in Buckley in North Wales, a mile or so from the Padeswood Cement Works. He was Chair of the Planning Committee when a planning application was submitted by Castle Cement, in 1999, to replace the old 1948 wet process plant with a Co-incinerating Cement Kiln and plant of near double the height, size and productive capacity of the old one. Arnold resigned his planning committee chairmanship in order to oppose the application. That led to him being elected as Chairman of the Campaign Against the New Kiln (CANK), and put him in touch with many supportive and informative anti-incineration campaigners, to whom he acknowledges a vast debt, for they taught him much in a short time.
Since 1999 Arnold has been an active campaigner and networker on incineration, co-incineration and landfill matters; a member of GAIA and a supporter of Zero Waste. In February of 2004, Arnold closed his security guarding company and retired, for all of two months! In May of that year he was elected as an independent member of Flintshire County Council.

Arnold's other involvements include:
1987-2002 Committee Member, then Chair of Chester & Clwyd Branch of the Institute of Industrial Management, subsequently the Chartered Management Institute.
1995-2001 Committee Member, then Chair of Crossroads, Alyn & Deeside Branch.
2002-present, Volunteer Director of CABx Flintshire
2002-present, Chairman, now committee member, Welsh Border Community Transport
2003-present, Member of Committee, currently Chairman, Over 50s Forum Flintshire.
2004-present, School Governor
2004-present, FCC representative on N.W. Regional Committee of the NSCA