Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Rodney Berman on Scam Green Incinerator

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1 comment:

womensvoice said...

Thank you for your letter of 15 December.

I am amazed that you have followed the officers' spin, instead of talking to Lib-Dems high in your party who have gone through these arguments in England - and therefore decided to oppose incineration and go for zero waste.

You dislike the term “sneaked thru” but submitting just pre-Xmas is a common trick. For the Council to say only the minimum 21-day consultation period is far from best practice. Many authorities would recognise that complex and controversial applications, especially an EIA-development with 2000 pages, require extended consultation. They allow not only more time, but arrange public events where it can be explained and scrutinised.

There have been extended contacts between the Officers and the applicants. They could have involved public representatives in setting the “scoping” requirements for Viridor’s incinerator EIA, but did not.

What is your justification for assuming maximum recycling/composting is only 65% when the WLGA/Eunomia study says 80-90% is feasible and best practice areas are heading that way? The zero-waste approach sees continuing reduction of residuals, via design changes, producer responsibility and separation/treatment technologies, so why don’t you support UK Lib-Dem policy?

Zero-waste is chosen policy world-wide, but Cardiff is being led (or pushed) into the incineration camp. Your officers can be told to study zero-waste communities, Friends of the Earth briefings and take on incinerator-neutral consultants (unlike Hyder).

On waste growth, the figures show that municipal waste is stagnant or falling in Wales as well as England. It’s your officers who have to justify projected increases (as they supported in the Regional Waste Plan), and learn lessons on waste reduction.

On landfill, it’s the Council’s short-sighted policy that failed Cardiff in rapidly using up the Lamby Way tipping space, profiting from commercial tipping and doing little on recycling, while planning to produce RDF in the future. When that failed your officers turned to direct incineration, and in both cases said you could reduce but not do without landfill. Having used up landfill space and failed to plan further, they now require us to pay to send huge tonnages to Biffa’s Merthyr landfill. They changed the Regional Waste Plan to go for incineration and omit landfill, even though much of the ash from incinerators has to go to landfill.

Why go to Germany to see an MBT system, when Northumberland has a lo-tech system operated by Sita that is recycling residues for land reclamation? And why quote the Caerphilly case when Lancashire has chosen Global Renewables for their MBT system and non-incineration outlets for the stabilate; likewise Leicestershire’s MBT from Lafarge? You should know that MBT technologies so readily dismissed by your officers are called “mature” by WAG’s consultants. Proven but still under development is what the Friends of the Earth’s appraisal shows.

If the Council’s technical officers are ready to dismiss MBT technologies on such shallow arguments rather than proper analysis of the technical options, how can we trust them to put proper advice into "consultation" on Viridor’s proposal? In this case, would you instruct them to make their reports public well in advance of it going to planning committee (not the standard 3-days), so that errors and distortions in their evidence can be challenged?

January 20, 2009 at 9:31 PM

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