2 June 2009
With elections to take place for Essex County Council on Thursday, the Green Party is urging voters to back Green candidates to help stop an incinerator being built in the county.
The Greens are standing in 56 wards - that is 80% of the total and have full slates in many districts.
Tory controlled Essex County Council is supporting waste burning and tried to grant planning permission in April for a massive waste burner at Rivenhall Airfield, but were prevented from doing so by the Secretary of State after thousands of local people wrote letters and signed petitions requesting a public inquiry. If built, the plant could burn over a thousand tonnes of waste A DAY.
The Greens are pointing to the blatant breaches of pledges that were made in letters to residents, and in the House of Lords, by the council leader Lord Hanningfield. He said there would be no incineration in Essex without a referendum.
Cllr. James Abbott, Essex Green Party Co-ordinator said
"The MPs expenses scandal is obviously, and rightly, the dominant political story at the moment. People are totally justifed in feeling angry with the major parties.
But here in Essex we have our own scandal. Essex County Council has claimed it opposes waste incineration when clearly it does not. It has claimed it supports recycling when its own strategy has unambitious targets and is out of date. It has twisted and turned to try and avoid revealing its true intention on waste and recycling in Essex. Thanks to major community campaigns, work by Green and other councillors and organisations such as FoE, the truth has been uncovered - a plan by Tory Essex County Council to burn hundreds of thousands of tonnes a waste a year and to probably privatise household waste collections.
If the Tories get their way, a few huge centralised waste plants would be built, also potentially bringing waste in from outside Essex. Kerbside collections could end up being controlled by the same private companies running the plants. There would be major cost risks to taxpayers as the scheme would be part funded by borrowing under the PFI - saddling taxpayers with repayments over decades.
Local people would have even less say over their local services, progress in recycling would be hit hard and valuable resources that could be recycled would instead be burnt, polluting the air we breathe. We would urge voters to use their vote on June 4th and register their opposition to incineration by voting Green"
The Greens offer a totally different waste and recycling policy for residents in Essex: the full manifesto can be seen at
http://witham- braintree. greenparty. org.uk/localsite s/witham- braintree/ campaigns/ manifesto. html
- absolutely no incineration
- work with local councils, companies, groups and residents to get recycling up to 70% within a decade
- develop district scale recycling centres and use genuinely green technologies such as anaerobic digestion for food and green wastes
- oppose privatisation; keep waste collections with local councils so that residents can be involved
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