Residents near the Besòs incinerator are demanding a four-year prison sentence for the plant's operations director.

BarcelonaThe neighborhood associations and entities that They have been pursuing legal proceedings for six years regarding air pollution from the Besòs waste incinerator plant. They requested that, in the trial, the plant's operations manager, FR, face a four-year prison sentence for a crime against natural resources and the environment that poses a serious risk to public health. With a request mirroring that of the Public Prosecutor's Office, the Airenet platform maintains that FR—who held the technical and operational management position at the Tersa plant—"allowed and consented to the plant operating systematically outside the parameters required by environmental regulations and tolerated the abnormal functioning of the facilities, which generated a serious risk to people."

The private prosecution brief filed by Airenet, represented by lawyers Andrés Maluenda and Anna Baró, also requests that FR be barred from working at waste treatment plants for one year – once his four-year sentence is served – and that he be fined €120. FR, as the "principal" owner of the "ordinary" operation of the Besòs plant, was responsible for the environmental and health risks, states the Airenet brief, which has been made public. The Newspaper and has consulted the ARA. They also hold him responsible for the dispersion of "substances that are highly polluting to the environment, air quality and health" through the facility's chimney.

The plaintiffs argue that the generation and emission of these pollutants required "rigorous and continuous control of the essential parameters of the incineration process," which they attribute to the defendant's "direct responsibility." According to Airenet, the infraction stemmed from the failure to reach a sufficiently high temperature in the plant's furnaces to ensure the decomposition of the polluting particles. They explain that the heat level at which the waste is burned is crucial to guaranteeing the complete destruction of the hazardous compounds generated during incineration and minimizing pollutant emissions. In this regard, the private prosecution indicates that the appropriate temperature range for breaking down carcinogenic dioxins and furans is between 800 and 1,140 degrees Celsius, which must reach at least 850 degrees for two seconds. Airenet points out that the Tersa plant, "under the responsibility and authorization of the defendant," failed to comply with these regulations. continuously failed to comply at least since 2017The prosecution alleges that on several occasions, waste was burned at temperatures below 850 degrees Celsius at Tersa's facilities, and that FR allowed the continuous use of an unauthorized, technically invalid control system, and denied access to data that would have allowed verification of the actual process temperature.

Regarding the impact of this pollution on health, Airenet points out that the World Health Organization (WHO) classifies dioxins and furans among the "most toxic substances known." These can cause "skin lesions such as chlorachnoid rash, liver damage and hyperpigmentation, and, in the long term, the development of cancer, neurological and endocrine disorders, decreased immune response, reproductive disorders, birth defects, and other serious health problems." The complaint filed by the platform that initiated the case was submitted to the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) and is currently the only one in the case file that has met "the rigorous standards required for publication in a scientific journal, making its findings and conclusions particularly revealing," Airenet adds.