The legal team of the Ekopole Association and SOS Anchors have obtained and analyzed all the Administration's "documents" to carry out the investigation. "We are in a position to certify that the managers of the Zubieta incinerator have not submitted some documents," they explain.

The results of the study have been published in a report signed by Gorka Bueno, professor of the UPV and member of the Ekopole. It is explained that there is no external report demonstrating the energy efficiency of the Zubieta incinerator, so the Environment Department of the Basque Government has no way of doing this calculation. Without this value, it has not been possible to classify as a waste energy recovery facility.

Report 2016 as a response

The research group first requested this public information from the Basque Government in April 2022. The annual report of the Environmental Monitoring Plan identifies the Zubieta plant with the code R1 as a waste energy recovery plant, but the report does not provide any "justification" for this nor does it provide the value of the energy efficiency mentioned above.

They therefore asked the Government for more information. But this has only sent them a document worth a measurement by SGS Technologies and an external energy efficiency verification report carried out in 2016, i.e. a written report with theoretical calculations when the incinerator was not built. Casually, the same value is repeated in both cases (0.82).

According to the study, it is clear that the managers and managers of the Zubieta incinerator have not made up-to-date external reports to measure the energy efficiency of the plant, and it is clear that these calculations have not been verified and controlled by the administration.

Pending environmental authorisation

This also affects the environmental authorisation of the incinerator. Indeed, within the Integrated Environmental Authorisation (AAI), waste treatment operations are authorised, among others, to obtain it is necessary to verify that incineration is carried out with a minimum level of efficiency.

The lack of this energy efficiency verification report determines that the IBB "loses or extinguishes its validity". Therefore, according to this study, the Zubieta incinerator is burning waste without having the current environmental authorisation.

Two inactive weeks

AnclSOS, for its part, denounced that the incinerator has been paralysed for at least two weeks since 17 April and is accumulating waste. The association finds that a generator that should generate electricity is broken.

He has also reviewed the many errors that the installation has suffered so far, and said that "of the five fundamental elements of the project, the only one missing to be wrong was that of the generator". It says that furnace boilers or gas extraction systems have already failed: "That is, there are no elements of a modern and safe installation that works properly. It's a huge botch, a big fraud."

For its part, the GHK has published a note following the public complaint made by ANCUSs. He explains that there has been a "small breakdown" in an electric bar, but that security systems have worked "automatically". The broken piece awaits renewal.