Rodney Berman on Scam Green

Anne to R Berman Leader of Cardiff Council

Green New Deal - not in Cardiff

Nick Clegg will lay out plans to divert the Government's planned economic stimulus to environmentally friendly projects. He will argue that Britain must invest in environmentally friendly projects to ensure the country pulls out of the looming recession on the road towards a low-carbon economy. Independent 15th Dec 2008

REPLY

Thank you for your comments. However, you appear to be conveniently ignoring the fact that Cardiff has become the first city in the UK to provide a free weekly collection of food waste for every street. You also appear to have overlooked the fact that we have also created a significant number of new jobs in recent years in the provision of both the new food waste collections and the previous expansion of green bag recycling collections. These include increased numbers of waste collection staff and new staff at our recycling plant in Lamby Way, one of the largest local authority-run recycling plants in Europe.

For the record, Viridor is a private company and neither Cardiff Council nor the Liberal Democrats are responsible for the fact they have recently submitted a planning application for an Energy from Waste plant.

The intention of Prosiect Gwyrdd, should it progress to a procurement process, is not to rule in or out any technology for residual waste treatment. The five local authorities who have joined together to take Prosiect Gwyrdd forward are committed to ensuring that there is the full opportunity for a range of solutions to come forward during procurement. Any proposal that comes forward would have to be assessed for its viability, but one of the factors that will also be taken into account will be its carbon footprint, expressed as global warming potential in units of tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents. All of this was explained in the recent report considered by Cardiff's Executive at its meeting on 4 December.

Yours sincerely,

Rodney Berman

Leader of Cardiff Council