The Public Prosecutor's Office has presented a letter in the Badalona court in which it denounces that the incinerator of the metropolitan area of Barcelona "uses conducts that violate environmental standards", with which it "puts at serious risk the health of citizens living in the surroundings of the incinerator" and makes the president of the public company Tersa, Eloi Badia, also responsible for the management of Barcelona Emergencies.

The main violation of the law would occur at the incineration temperature of the waste. The European directive obliges all waste contained in furnaces to withstand a temperature of at least 850°C for two seconds, as it is considered the necessary measure to undo dioxins, and those responsible for the incineration plants must verify this through the meters installed in the furnace. According to the prosecutor, this does not happen, and in exchange for that, the temperature is credited to the Environmental Quality management of the Generalitat by means of calculations and formulas with algorithms.

According to La Vanguardia in the public prosecutor’s documentation, the study analyzed the documentation submitted by those responsible for the incinerator between 2015 and 2019 and concluded that “many times the temperature of the furnaces does not reach 850°C, the temperature level required by the regulations has not been guaranteed and this has been a serious risk”. It appears that an internal communication of 2011 found to those responsible for the incinerator indicates that they did not reach 850°C in order to save the cost of the natural gas to be burned.

The Generalitat, always according to the prosecutor, asked the company in 2018 to use a series of auxiliary smokers in furnaces where the temperature was below 850°C and to better complete the documentation to be sent to the Generalitat, but the officials of Tersa have not.

In its report, the Office of the Prosecutor states that these are further violations of the law. Since 2007, the law obliges the incinerator to continuously monitor some special pollutants (nitrous oxide NO2, carbon CO, sulphur dioxide SO2…), but no results have been found in the investigation.

The Airenet Association has for years been denouncing what is happening in Sant Adrià de Besòs, the largest incineration plant in Catalonia, and it seems that the prosecution has taken steps from the courts to investigate the case. In addition to these irregularities, the Airenet Association has denounced that those responsible for the incinerator in Tersa systematically stole environmental regulations on waste incineration. As an example, what happened in 2018 was mentioned, when the incinerator’s emissions were being controlled, in order for the temperature of the furnaces to reach 850°C, they had to burn a lot of natural gas – as was explained later in the annual consumption statistics – but when the observation was more demanding, they went back to work as usual.