Can WAG justify, especially in a period of reduced public expenditure, the guarantee of £9 million per year to waste incineration in the Cardiff/Newport area (report 27 May) ?
It was justified in the 27 January 2009 Press Release as "producing much needed energy". Yet we know the electricity from one of these large incinerators is pretty small, 20 or 30MW, compared with normal power stations (several 100MW up to Aberthaw’s 1450MW).
Various mechanical and bio-treatments (MBT) are roughly half the cost of incinerators, but WAG’s officials were so set on incineration that they approved the £9 million/year despite adopted policy to minimise waste disposal by landfill and incineration.
They also threatened to make things difficult for MBT by banning use of compost-like outputs for land reclamation, though permitted in England (and meeting the standards for applying treated sewage sludge to land). At the same time, they proposed to ignore the toxicity of incinerator ash and classify as “recycling” its use in embankments or other construction.
The landfill tax is now a nice earner at £48 per tonne, rising to £72 per tonne, with WAG getting its fraction from the central exchequer. WAG’s officials rigged the financial assessments to make out that incineration would be less costly than landfill, and ignored the tax-millions coming back.
Now that public expenditure realities are hitting us, is there a chance that we will get an evidence-based waste strategy based on MBT, like Ireland ’s? Will WAG find some way to get out of the extraordinarily rash promise of £9 million per year to the Cardiff/Newport incinerator ?
Max Wallis
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