10 January 2012
Essex County Council has, as expected, announced that the preferred bid for the Essex and Southend Waste Contract will centre on a Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) plant at Courtauld Road in Basildon. The preferred bidder, The Urbaser/Balfour Beatty consortium has proposed the facility to "treat" kerbside collected residual waste ("black bag" waste), trade waste collected by local Essex authorities, street sweepings, and all non-recyclable waste from household recycling centres across Essex and Southend.
The plant would be capable of handling up to 417,000 tonnes of municipal waste a year.
The County Council is also consulting (until 19th January) on its Waste Development Document (WDD) Preferred Approach. The Green Party is concerned that Essex County Council is once again giving unduly favourable support to the 3 large proposed sites at Basildon, Rivenhall and Stanway and also that the council is trying to disguise its support for waste incineration in the documents (1).
Cllr. James Abbott, spokesperson for Essex Green Party said
"We were expecting Essex County Council to choose Basildon because they have control of the site.
But this proposal is a long way from the "sustainable waste management solution" claimed.
A substantial proportion of the material trucked into this plant will have to trucked out again, then having to be either landfilled or burnt - which still leaves the door open for a waste incinerator to be built in Essex.
Despite denials, Essex County Council has long supported an incinerator in the county, and backed plans for a 360,000 tonne per year waste burner on Rivenhall Airfield at a Planning Inquiry in 2009. The County Council also modelled such an incinerator in its original PFI bid to the Government - on the same site.
The current waste consultation on the WDD is a typically opaque set of documents from the county council, and once again gives policy backing for large scale waste burning whilst at the same time trying to disguise this fact - for example by referring to it as "energy from waste" and falsely claiming that all such waste burning produces renewable energy.
By awarding a 25 year contract for residual municipal waste at Basildon, Essex will become locked into an unsustainable waste management regime that could bring commercial pressure to cap recycling rates. Its a simple equation - the more we recycle, the more we reduce waste, the less there is to feed the huge centralised waste factories proposed by Essex County Council.
Tory controlled Essex County Council has been consistently wrong on waste policy. Over a decade ago when this process started, they were pessimistic about the prospects for recycling and waste minimisation. The reality is that Essex waste is not growing and we are now recycling 50% county-wide, with the best districts at over 60% - a great success story.
Instead of planning for 25 years of waste disposal, we should be planning for 25 years of increased recycling and composting, based on district scale plants and programmes. The Green Party has long proposed that at least 70% recycling and composting could be achieved by 2020, which would leave the proposed Basildon plant nearly half empty."
ENDS
Notes
(1) http://consult.essexcc.gov.uk/portal/wdd_preferred_approach_-_appendix_e_preferred_sites_and_non-selected_sites
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