A last minute controversy could scupper waste plans in East Sussex.

The consultation period on waste plans produced by East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove Council ended yesterday.

But a growing controversy in Newcastle has led to calls for any plans for an incinerator in Sussex to be put on hold until health guarantees are forthcoming.

When an incinerator was built at Byker in Newcastle in the late-Seventies people living nearby were told it would be clean and safe, a model of modern technology.

Twenty-one years later no waste is being burned at Byker as the authorities struggle to contain a scandal that could de-rail Government plans to forge ahead with a new generation of waste to energy incinerators.

The storm brewing in the north poses questions about building burners at Newhaven and Mountfield Mine, near Robertsbridge - the key part of waste plans produced by East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove Council.

For six years, hundreds of tonnes of ash from the Byker incinerator was spread on paths, parks and allotments across the city, with it was spread highly toxic dioxins on a scale still not wholly known.

But it was not until this year, when local people started asking questions, that Newcastle City Council and the local health authority acted, telling parents not to let children under-two play in 28 allotments.

People were told not to eat eggs or poultry from any of the allotments until further notice.

They were also told to wash all fruit and vegetables and to peel all root vegetables because of contamination by dioxins and heavy metals such as lead, zinc and copper.

"Byker is a world class disaster. Or to be clear, it is a world class dioxin disaster," according to waste economist Keith Collins of environmental consultants Ecologika.

He says the incinerator at Byker is producing dioxins 1,000 times higher than there should be which presents a real health hazard.

Dioxins are highly toxic, are a known cause of cancer and also threaten the human immune system and cause sterlity.

The council, which wants to double the Byker incinerator's capacity, eventually ordered the removal of more than 2,000 tonnes of the ash because of the contamination.

As well as dioxins, tests on the ash found very high levels of heavy metals - including mercury at 2,406 per cent above accepted levels, cadmium at 785 per cent above normal and lead 136 per cent higher than expected.

The growing scandal in Newcastle did not emerge until last year when plans were unveiled to expand the burner. It then became clear that no one, not even the Environment Agency which is responsible for regulating and monitoring incinerators, had ever checked the plant at Byker.

The Environment Agency admitted to MPs earlier this autumn it does not know how dangerous the new generation of waste to energy incinerators might be.

Paddy Johnstone, of the Brighton-based recycling co-operative Magpie, and an ardent critic of the Brighton and Hove and East Sussex waste plans, wants incinerators rejected until they are proved to be safe.

He said: "If our Environment Agency don't know then we have got to defer to someone else who reckons they do know.

"The Environmental Protection Agency in the United States says they are dangerous, they do produce dioxins and they will increase the number of deaths."

The trans-Atlantic equivalent of our own Environment Agency, recently said it believed dioxins may be some 1,000 times more dangerous to human health than previously thought.

The fears are shared by Lewes MP Norman Baker, who believes doubts about the safety of incineration are growing so fast it would be a mistake to build a burner anywhere in Sussex.

He said: "An alarm bell has been rung which those producing the waste plan must hear. We have had one disaster in the Lewes area with the floods, we don't want another one with an incinerator."