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Incineration claims disputed
11:49am Wednesday 14th May 2008
CLAIMS that a county council has made a U-turn on its no-incineration policy have been strongly denied by the authority's leader.
Green Party member James Abbott, district councillor for Rivenhall, believes an environmental report commissioned by Essex County Council to accompany its Draft Waste Strategy confirms that the authority is planning a waste incinerator for the county.
Mr Abbott is concerned it could be built at Rivenhall Airfield because it is used as an example site for a solid recovered fuel plant (SRF) in the council's outline business case for private finance initiative cash.
He said: "It confirms what Essex Green Party has been saying all along - that the energy plant' is in fact a waste incinerator and that a plant of the size being suggested by the county council would typically cover 6,600 sq metres and have a chimney stack 70m high.
"The plant being suggested by the county council is also discussed in its PFI outline business case bid to burn 255,000 tonnes of municipal waste a year."
But council leader Lord Hanningfield said: "The county council's position has not changed; there will be no mass burn incineration in Essex.
"This is just pure political scaremongering by Cllr Abbott.
"We are exploring the option of PFI credits because of government requirements, and this is not an indication that it will be the final option for financing or an indeed of any site location.
"The only thing that is fact is the planning permission has been granted at Rivenhall for an anaerobic digester plant, for any kind of energy from waste plant to be built the full and proper planning processes would need to be gone through.
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Cllr. James Abbott, Rivenhall says...
11:50pm Wed 21 May 08
I welcome that and therefore hope he and his Conservative colleagues show some honesty about what the County Council intends doing with waste in Essex ie burning about a third of it.
It would help if Cllr. Lager and his colleagues actually started by reading the waste documents their own council has published.
He would then see that all the information that Green Councillors have published on the waste strategy comes from those documents, including the huge size of the proposed Rivenhall Airfield waste site, the proposal to build a large waste incinerator in Essex, modelled at Rivenhall, the 230 ft chimney, the negative environmental and climate change impacts of burning so much waste, etc.
Cllr Lager also asks what the Green Party alternatives are. He knows full well what our alternatives are because he sits in the same meetings as we do and hears them. We propose no waste incineration, maximising recycling levels, district based anaerobic digestion plants and a major programme of waste minimisation.
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Cllr Michael Lager, Witham says...
11:14am Thu 15 May 08
If any such plant is eventually built on the Rivenhall airfield site, which is a long way from the nearest settlements, I am quite determined it will conform to the highest standards of design, construction and operation including the strictest cleaning of any emissions before release of anything into the atmosphere. I don't know where this story about a 200 ft chimney has come from as it's the first I've heard of it. What does concern people however is the access and added traffic particularly through Bradwell. When the present government gets round to making up its mind about the A120 link with the A12, and if Rivenhall gets the go ahead, I would like to see an access from the A120 near the site.
It's hard to understand what the Green lobby would like to see instead of the County Council's approach, which seeks to reduce refuse at source, to sort out recyclables at the earliest point, and then to process the remainder into useable residues including a high-energy solid fuel.
The Green lobby seems without a policy except to oppose, and as far as I can gather favours local disposal, for which the only technology is dumping in fast-vanishing landfill sites (where harmful methane escapes into the atmosphere) or the mass incineration they wrongly accuse the County Council of pursuing.
Let's have a debate but let's have an honest one.