BID TO TRUCK INCINERATOR WASTE TO RIVENHALL AIRFIELD FROM “ANYWHERE”

Cllr. James Abbott, Green Party District and County Councillor said

 “We are now in our 22nd year of this seemingly endless parade of waste planning applications from Gent Fairhead.

Following the failure to get consent for a 14 million tonne landfill in 1995, the first version of the current plant appeared a decade ago. That was for what Gent Fairhead claimed was a “recycling plant for Essex”. But it was widely believed locally that it was a Trojan Horse application for an incinerator. As early as the 1990’s, preliminary proposals for an incinerator had been published.

As the years go by, Gent Fairhead tries to make the plant bigger, widen its catchment and increase the emphasis on waste incineration. The company may call it “Energy from Waste” and have a website with pretty pictures of green fields, but if this plant is ever built it will include a dirty great big incinerator – just 1 km from the village of Silver End and burning all manner of waste types – presumably anything they can burn under whatever licence they can get.

The electricity and heat generated will largely be used internally in the plant – it is not a “Combined Heat and Power” plant in the normal sense – where heat would be piped out to benefit local houses or businesses.

There is also a wider environmental impact. 2014 has been confirmed as the warmest year on record globally. If the Rivenhall waste site is built it will be pumping out hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year plus the emissions from approximately 100,000 HGV movements per year in and out of the plant - and as we now know, from ever further afield. So local communities will get lower air quality and yet more traffic. It is a completely unsustainable proposal. 

This current application appears to have little to do with planning and a lot to do with the commercial failure to build the plant over the 5 years since consent was given. The attempt to delete Conditions 28 and 30 completely negates their purpose in a key respect – that they were set out as requirements on the operators to use their “reasonable endeavours” to source waste within Essex or the region in the early years of operation. Yet there is no plant built, or even started. There are no operators. 

If these latest changes were to be allowed, Essex could end up with a very large waste plant that is trucking in most of its waste from outside Essex. Not only is this contrary to the Proximity Principle, it would be a huge irony given the superb support of local residents for recycling.”

Representations can be sent to Essex County Council before the deadline of January 29th at mineralsandwasteDM@essex.gov.uk quoting reference 

NOTES: 

(1)

Condition 28:

(i) Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) shall be sourced internally from the IWMF or within the administrative boundaries of Essex and Southend-on-Sea.

(ii) If the Waste Planning Authority is satisfied that the operator has used its reasonable endeavours to source SRF from these sources and there remains capacity within the IWMF, then SRF arising from elsewhere within the East of England may be used up to the available capacity for a period up to three years from the date of the agreement of the Waste Planning Authority.

(iii) No development shall commence until a scheme giving effect to the requirement of clause (i) above of this condition is submitted to and approved in writing by the Waste Planning Authority. The approved scheme shall be implemented as approved. 

Condition 30

(i) No more than 50% of the imported waste paper and card (based on a nominal imported tonnage of pre-sorted waste paper and card of 360,000 tpa) shall be sourced from outside the administrative boundaries of the East of England Region.

(ii) If the Waste Planning Authority is satisfied that the operator has used its reasonable endeavours to source 50% of the imported pre-sorted waste paper and card from within the East of England region, then the imported pre-sorted waste paper and card may be sourced from outside the East of England Region for a period of up to 5 years from the date of written agreement of the Waste Planning Authority.

(iii) No development shall commence until a scheme giving effect to the requirement of clause (i) above of this condition is submitted to and approved in writing by the Waste Planning Authority. The approved scheme shall be implemented as approved. 

(2)

The Rivenhall Airfield waste site was first allocated in the Essex Waste Plan in 2001 but with restrictions on the size of the site and the scale of the buildings, due to the fact that the site is in the countryside. 

In 2007 Essex County Council (ECC) ignored its own Plan and granted planning permission to Gent Fairhead for the “RCF” – a “recycling and composting facility” on the site which had a much larger site size and much larger buildings than allowed for in the Plan. The plant was described as serving Essex. It was widely believed locally to be a Trojan Horse application. 

In 2008 Gent Fairhead duly submitted an application for a larger plant, the “eRCF” which Steven Smith, of Golder Associates, now of Honace, claimed would “take recycling in Essex to the next level through the provision of a fully integrated facility that will essentially provide a ‘closed loop’ waste treatment process.” The eRCF had an input tonnage of over 800,000 tpa and included a waste incinerator, which had been widely expected due to documents submitted to Essex County Council during the Essex Waste Plan process in the late 1990s which showed proposals for an incinerator at the site sunk into the ground – the same as now. 

The eRCF application was granted by ECC by 4 votes to 3 in early 2009 after the Chairman of the Planning Committee had voted twice using his casting vote. The decision was made by ECC despite over 800 letters of objection and just 1 in favour. It was also granted despite the previous RCF consent having a “no waste burning” condition attached. 

After a campaign by the local community and with objections from residents, local parish councils, Braintree District Council and many organisations, the application was called in to an Inquiry in late 2009. Objections covered issues including harm to the countryside, landscape visual impact, loss of agricultural land, pressure on the A120, biodiversity impacts - including on protected species and BAP species, dewatering, water abstraction from the River Blackwater, loss of TPO woodland, impacts on the locally rich bird species, light pollution, noise and reduction in local air quality from the incinerator emissions.  

Prior to and during the Inquiry Gent Fairhead grew the plant in size again and changed it again, adding capacity to the incinerator (to 360,000 tpa), widening the catchment outside Essex and placing more emphasis on commercial and industrial wastes.

Consent was granted by the Secretary of State in March 2010, but with over 60 conditions, including detailed conditions on the sources of waste owing to the Proximity Principle and the fact that the plant was being promoted and designed as an integrated facility to help deliver strategic facilities to meet the capacity requirements of Essex. The policies and strategic model in which the plant was being proposed were set out in both the Essex Waste Strategy and the ECC PFI bid to the Government and supported by the Essex Capacity Report. Indeed Gent Fairhead stated in their eRCF application that they were submitting it in order to meet those requirements.

At the Inquiry, objectors raised doubts about the commercial viability of the proposed huge plant. These were dismissed by the applicants who stated that should consent be granted, they would start building it “straight away”. That did not happen and in 2012, the applicants submitted another application in an attempt to split the plant into 2 phases in order to build half the plant, including the incinerator element, first. The application did not succeed and it was widely seen locally as an indication that the applicants could not build what they had consent for and would inevitably come back again for further changes, as indeed they have.

The 2014 application to extend the start time for the plant was granted, but for 1 year only, not the 2 years applied for. The new deadline is March 2016.