PLANS TO build eight major waste incinerators across Scotland are threatening to bust the Scottish government's limit on waste-burning, according to a new survey.

Waste companies are proposing to boost Scotland's incineration capacity 12-fold, to more than a million tonnes a year. Huge new plants are being planned in Lanarkshire, Aberdeenshire, Highland and East Lothian.

But they will make it difficult for ministers to meet their target to limit incineration. The environment minister, Richard Lochhead, said in January that the proportion of municipal waste to be burnt in waste-to-energy plants should be kept below 25% by 2025.

He says there was a role for some incineration but rejected the need for "large, inefficient, white-elephant incinerators". Too much capacity could create a demand for waste, and undermine attempts to reduce and recycle it.

The latest plan is for a new incinerator at Drumshangie near Greengairs in Lanarkshire to burn 300,000 tonnes of waste a year. Planning applications have also been made for incinerators at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Invergordon in Highland and Dunbar in East Lothian. Smaller incinerators have been given planning permission at Irvine in Ayrshire, Glenfarg in Perthshire, Elgin in Morayshire, and Dumfries.

The capacity of the eight proposed plants could amount to 1.03 million tonnes of waste a year (see table). When combined with the 80,000 tonnes burnt at the existing incinerators in Dundee and Shetland, this could exceed 25% of Scotland's municipal waste.

The survey of planned incinerators was carried out by Friends of the Earth Scotland. "This rash of proposals represents a massive and unprecedented increase in incineration across Scotland," said Stuart Hay, the environmental group's head of campaigns. "At this rate, the government's 25% energy-from-waste cap could be smashed by the march of incinerators at a local level."

But the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (Cosla) said some of the incinerators hadn't yet been given planning permission. A Cosla spokesman said: "Where the waste is burnt, the emissions from power plants compare very well against, say, cars, so it is ridiculous to scaremonger in this way."

The Chartered Institution of Wastes Management said the incinerators could also help turn some of Scotland's 18 million tonnes of commercial and industrial waste a year into energy.

The government's green advisers, the Sustainable Development Commission, accepted that energy from waste had a role to play, but only if "strict criteria" were applied. "We have welcomed the commitment to set a regional cap on energy from waste as well as targets on plant efficiency," said the commission's director, Maf Smith.

"The Scottish government aspires to zero waste and earlier this year I set out a number of ambitious policies aimed at making it a reality," Lochhead said.