Prosiect Gwyrdd Councils put all bets on a massive central incinerator, egged on by Welsh government grants and politicians. They shortlisted four options, all incinerators, two of which have withdrawn and a third is in doubt, leaving themselves with Viridor able to dictate terms as none of the Councils has a Plan B. Cardiff has admitted that their fallback is to continue sending waste to Trecatti landfill, despite telling us this will incur £200 per tonne penalties. Yet more intensive efforts on recycling, proven to work elsewhere, would avoid this at much lower cost.
P. Gwyrdd/Incinerator's second consequence is the scaring away of alternative bidders (Sterecyle's autoclave; New Earth Solutions' MBT) and deterring local businesses from investing in the diversity of non-incineration technologies. So we might learn from Cornwall where local businesses and anti-incineration campaigners already have quick and cheaper proposals in the wings. Like Prosiect Gwyrdd Councils, the Cornwall County Council failed to plan the waste facilities that businesses wanted, but some are in embryo despite them. Can Cardiff , Newport and the others learn from the story below?
Cornwall incinerator campaigners' alternative plans
21 October 2011 | By Katie Coyne
Jubilant campaigners who won a legal battle in Cornwall against an incinerator scheme are pressing for alternative plans to dispose of the county’s waste.
Last week, the high court overturned planning permission for the £117m Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre at St Dennis, to be operated by Sita, because crucial work scrutinising its impact on nearby Special Areas of Conservation was not done.
The secretary of state was given three weeks to appeal the judgment. Such was the council’s confidence the case would go Sita’s way that preparatory work on the site of the 240,000 tonne incinerator already underway - that has had to be stopped.
Cornwall Council called the ruling “extremely disappointing” and added that delays in establishing a site were costing £1m a month in road haulage and landfill taxes.
Sita project director David Buckle said: “This judgment gives us cause for considerable concern and we will need to study the detail of this decision and consider any possible remedies.
“We have always believed that the CERC is the best technical, financial and environmental solution for managing Cornwall’s waste and it is important that the scheme is able to progress, as without it Cornwall is facing an enormous waste problem.”
Campaigners from Cornwall Waste Forum (CWF), however, have been working on a Plan B for the county’s waste disposal. They want what they call decentralised high materials recycling with gasification and AD, claiming the ruling presented “a brilliant opportunity for Cornwall to move into the 21st century.”
They point to Surrey where county council - also working with Sita - dropped plans two years ago to build two incinerators and instead invested in gasification and AD facilities. The move netted the council a saving of £150m.
CWF’s St Dennis branch campaigner Charmian Larke said: “Why wouldn’t you do that? I think you have to be totally dotty to not do that – of course I am biased.”
The forum also urges the council to use facilities being developed by the private sector. Larke said: “The private sector has been getting on and doing it while the councils have been wringing their hands.”
One example is at Hallenbeagle industrial estate in the middle of Cornwall where entrepreneurs want to build a 45,000 tonne advanced thermal plant which could be scaled up to process half the county’s household waste.
Campaigners argue the current contract could be broken up and spread across smaller contractors. Alternatively, the council could bring waste management in-house, which it did before the contract with Sita.
Cornwall Council warned that terminating the contract with Sita could cost it more than £50m.
A spokeswoman said: “The costs quoted were based on the assumption that we would be required to terminate the contract, on a force majeure basis, and pay SITA between £30m and £50m.
“Terminating the contract would also mean that the council would have to continue to rely on municipal landfill to deal with its waste until at least 2014. The cost of paying landfill tax would be over £14m a year by this time.
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Single incinerator was not Cornwall’s ‘only’ option 21 October 2011 | By Katie Coyne
Alternatives to Cornwall‘s single incinerator waste scheme were put to the council but have been ignored for 10 years, say business leaders.
Director of the Hallenbeagle estate Russell Dodge argued that the industrial estate in Scorrier, Redruth, was earmarked as a possible site for dealing with West Cornwall’s household waste. But because the council took no action, business leaders have been developing plans for commercial and industrial waste treatment at the site, which has since been renamed the Cornwall Bio Park.
However, in light of the High Court ruling taking away planning permission for the 240,000-tonne incinerator, Dodge has suggested that plans could be amended to take on household waste.
He said there is space at Redruth to double the proposed 45,000-tonne capacity advanced thermal plant so it could deal with all of the waste in the west of the county – half of all Cornwall’s waste. Once planning has been granted, it could be built and operational by February 2013.
Dodge said: “That’s a plan B – it’s already happening – if they were willing to talk to us and participate with us.
“We presented the Hallenbeagle as an alternative to the single incinerator 10 years ago. It’s really annoying that the council has chosen a non-sustainable option and then has been pushing it through on the financial grounds that it’s costing the taxpayer.”
Dodge said a further two areas within the Cornwall Bio Park have yet to be assigned and could be used for waste sorting and treatment.
He added: “In the meantime, we have been getting on with doing our own thing, focusing on commercial and industrial waste because this is where the gravy is. The waste disposal authority has not been planning for commercial and industrial waste. It’s been planning for household – that’s another failing of Cornwall Council.”
A second site in Fraddon, also close to the A30, already has planning permission to build an anaerobic digestion facility with a 50,000-tonne capacity, producing 900KW of electricity. The site is being developed to take farm and commercial food waste, but could take in household waste if a food waste collection service was introduced across Cornwall.
Dodge said it had been struggling to find backers, but now has a private investor in place and has put in a bid for further funding from the Low Carbon Grant Fund, which is European Regional Development Fund money being administered by the Convergence Programme for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.
A council spokesperson said it could not comment until the secretary of state for communities and local government had decided whether to appeal the High Court’s decision to quash planning permission for the incinerator. She said: “We need this clarity before we can make any further comment.”
The Cornwall Bio Park is split in half by the Penzance to London Paddington rail link, so there is potential rail freight access. The site is also close to the A30, providing good access to Camborne-Pool-Redruth and Truro and the rest of West Cornwall.
A planning application was put in this week by Cory Environmental to develop facilities to process C&I waste at the Bio Park.
Cornwall incinerator decision: a triumph for localism? 21 October 2011
Matthew Thomson, chief executive, London Community Resource Network
With 75% of municipal waste infrastructure planning permissions granted through the appeals system, the high court judgment over Sita’s proposed incinerator at St Dennis in Cornwall might look, on the face of it, like another shot in the long-running war between Nimbys and waste planners.
The case is no mere Nimby debate though, and the latest judgment is another twist in an extraordinary tale of convoluted decision-making distorted by conflicting interests, contradictory ‘facts’, loca authority unitarisation, and confused waste planning and procurement.
Perhaps the Government’s Localism Bill can help prevent such painful long drawn out muddles in future - there is certainly huge scope for improvement - but it will do so only if lessons are learned now.
The high court judgment makes apparent that the process by which relevant ‘competent authorities’ reached their various decisions about the proposed Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre was opaque not just to the communities affected, but also to the authorities themselves.
With significant implications for the localism and planning deregulation agendas, there seem to be two key areas where clarity must be provided - one about a community’s right to be taken seriously; the other about the relation between the planning and environmental protection regimes.
At the heart of Cornwall Waste Forum’s case, upheld by the high court, was their ‘legitimate expectation’ that substantive points raised in the planning and permitting processes be properly considered. The fight this small self-funded community network had to be heard at all demonstrates that we still have much to learn about effective working with communities - especially where communities of interest overlap with geographic communities. Just because people are local doesn’t mean they lack technical knowledge or rigour!
The lack of due consideration of the substantive points raised by the Cornwall Waste Forum illuminated a gap, and some confusion, between the Planning Inspectorate, the Environment Agency and Natural England. The boundaries of the planning, pollution control and habitat
protection regimes were found in this case not to meet.
Lord Chief Justice Collins made clear that while the Environment Agency was the authority with regard to the pollution control of an operation, the Planning Authority should attend to its impacts even where these result from an operation controlled by the agency.
So in the future planning regime, if the presumption is to be for sustainable development, whose definition should we be following? It’s clear now that the answer is far from clear. A bad answer will see a proliferation of judicial reviews as we work it out on a case by case basis.
