Scotland’s Top 20 Polluters

As the shambles and scandal of Drax tumbles out in to the open ‘UK power station owner cuts down primary forests in Canada’ – we have our own problems here in Scotland. For issue 4 of LESS – Scotland’s journal of degrowth and radical abundance – we partnered with The Ferret (Scotland’s award winning investigative journalism cooperative) to produce this infographic of Scotland’s Top 20 Polluters.

Read issue 4 editorial Other Worlds HERE.

Read Remembering the Tuath by Col Gordon HERE.

Read Somersaulting out of a Cave of Gold: thoughts on the current and future condition of the Gàidhealtachd by Iain Mackinnon HERE.

The infographic is a pull-out poster with the magazine, you can get it HERE.

The Number One of our Top Twenty is Peterhead Power Station. It burns North Sea gas. C02 emissions from 2020 were 1,294,000t

Number Two is Grangemouth Refinery (a 50:50 venture by Ineos and PetroChina) which had 2020 emissions of 1,036,000t.

Number Three is an old favourite – ExxonMobil’s Mossmorran Ethylene Plant in Fife which – as well as contaminating and disturbing the local community – spews out 902,000t of emissions (2020).

In at Number Four is Ineos – Grangemouth Chemical Plant. The plant produces ethylene, ethanol, and polypropylene and emits 615,000t per year (2020).

Number 5 makes a hat-trick for Grangemouth with Ineos’s gas-fired CHP Plant – which emits 615,000t of C02 emissions.

Based on The Rogues Gallery “of the most climate-trashing sites in Scotland” by Rob Edwards and Paul Dobson in which they argued that oil and gas companies “cannot be trusted to lead the transition to a zero-carbon economy”.

Design by Andy Arthur @cocteautriplets