Gloucestershire incinerator health claims "unfounded" says chief

“Areaman - Avonmouth - the gasifier is under development - several years to develop/commission, throughput relatively small, and I am sure will be the subject of a further contract - in the mean time as you say the RDF is being shipped to Rotterdam.

The proximity principle, reduction at source, etc, all O.K - what matters is financial and environmental cost overall - Glos CC is behind in what you say - joined up collection and treatment to achieve most financial/environmental efficiencies. Recycling is of no value if inefficient/high cost and overall far too expensive in comparison with landfill.

Check some good practice - e.g the multi-fuel waste to energy plant being built at Ferrybridge Yorks servicing a number of large authorities and spearheaded by Southern and Scottish Energy and large local councils - they have the necessary project development and technical/financial/contract management skills to be able to make the best use of such facilities.”

“Standishgreen - I don't know whether you're just trying to score points, or whether you're genuinely not aware, but most of the output of an MBT gets burnt in incinerators or brick kilns etc. At the moment, the Avonmouth incinerator ships well over half of its input to Holland to be burnt in an incinerator. Wacking great additional fuel and carbon costs and genuinely **** approach that someone else should be sorting out our waste - all for the political point of letting Lib Dems in Bristol say they didn't build an incinerator. In many ways its no more acceptable than shipping PCBs to China for recycling. Total and utter violation of both the proximity principle and the polluter pays principles - which are the sort of things you might think you'd be interested in. The Avonmouth plant, in its defence, is hoping to build their own, "new" technology incinerator- but if that was being built in Gloucestershire, I'm sure your mob would be the first to point out the dangers of an untested technology with no proof of its impact on health/the environment etc.

If you reckon we can reduce residual waste further and faster than GCC is proposing then the Green party has a great opportunity to do just that. You're in the driving seat on Stroud District Council, where you're responsible for waste collection. Put together a plan, work out what it costs and persuade the public to do it. No-one is stopping you - go for it! Otherwise, you are open to the conclusion that, at best the Greens are simply avoiding responsibility - finding fault with everything and doing nothing - or at worst that you're just opposing things for the sake of politics. Neither are great.”

“standishgreen - plant contractors will build whatever plant the customer pays for - and any technology build will have to meet environmental regulations.

Without repeating previous comments on the subject - MBT is a mix of treatments and an intermediate process, i.e the output from the process refuse derived fuel ( simply a dried up, part composted material) has to be fed into an energy from waste plant, mixed with coal in a coal fired power station, or gasified (partial combustion) through further process/combustion plants. Take your pick - the overall costs much higher than straight combustion although some claim gasification will be cleaner and offer opportunities for multi-use as a gaseous fuel is more versatile. These technologies are all under development and any RDF produced at present in the U.K goes to an incinerator, coal fired power station, or if the quality is no good - to landfill, albeit a little drier and less volume.

No easy answer or golden bullett from the cost or environmental viewpoints.

An MBT plant is not much of a pretty sight compared with a waste to energy plant and has various emissions and effluents to cope with, if not hot chimney exhaust.”

“Well Bonkim, it's not a question of blaming the contractor. I was simply responding to his email. He does work in a business that I believe is seriously contributing to the world's problems rather than trying to solve them. He is obviously a capable man and has choices about what he does. UBB are building MBT in Essex because the local authority said they would not have MBI. So you are right in that GCC could have done likewise. Trouble is, they scrapped a MBT project in 2005/6 and Tories don't do U-turns. Saving their face is far more important to them than our pockets, environment or health.”

“standishgreen what is the point of blaming the contractor of the plant?

agree with you that world populations are exploding, water, energy, and mineral resources are depleting fast, and air and water fouling every day. Man's tenure is also limited - decades/few centuries at best - our political, economic and industrial systems have evolved over the past 2 or 3 centuries at a time populations were small across the earth, and available resources appeared inexhaustible and within the grasp of early economists and entrepreneurs who opened up the land and its wealth.

We are now locked into the system of digging out the earth's resources, transforming the materials into consumer products which people buy and consume, creating huge amounts of waste, quite apart from the wasteful use of the materials, through sheer ignorance or by design.

Regrettably, the process cannot continue indefinitely and will hit us all. But does man change unless hit hard?”

“THE big issue for all of us is that burning 190,000 tons per annum of "waste" replicated across the country means 2 million tons pa. The UK has less than 1% of the world's population. So that's 100 million tons across the world. For how much longer does Javier of Gotherington think we can continue to rip out the earth's natural resources, make goods from them, then turn them to smoke and ash. In the process of course we are also accelerating climate change. Unless we begin to make goods that really last, are capable of repair and can be recycled at end of life, then eventually we will return to depending upon wood, animal skins & wool for all our needs, while living on hilltops above waterworld. OK, it's 20 generations away, but do we have the right to abuse the world so badly that the future for them looks more like the stone age?
This project is wrong, plain and simple. Waste must be drastically reduced and the residuals processed so that they can be used for some purpose. Generating electricity can be done from many renewable sources. Burnt waste is not one of them,. You can only burn it once.”

“PengiPete and Ysedra make important points - regards tonnages of residual waste - not too difficult to work out average daily lorry traffic - it would be less than what went to the Hempsted landfill site at one time.

Valuable materials would be taken out (quite another question whether the present so called recycling is either cost or environmentally most effective options and whether GlosCC missed a kick by not otimising collections together with treatment - dumbos).

Regards the issues raised by Cliffrat - businesses will look at the lowest cost option meeting any regulatory requirements - the boiler at Javelin Park is designed by a European boiler maker from the Babcocks International designs, and the exhaust gas cleaning has to meet relevant UK and EU regulations - they also have to submit environmental impact report or reports covering the range of issues including traffic, gaseous emissions, liquid effluents, ash disposal, etc, etc. It would be unproductive to discuss such complex matters in a general forum and fgo round in circles.

My only contention is that the Javelin Park project appears to be very expensive compared to others - for example the Ferrybridge multi-fuel waste to energy plant which is many times the size but half the price. May be it is the amateur manner GlosCC have handled the whole project - as Ysedra states, pre- 2005 Labour were coming aroud to the same concepts but the 2005 election saw political machinations and about turn and ultimately the county failing to generate a properly thought through functional concept to achieve maximum cost and environmental efficiency culminating in this contract which has taken over seven years and much uncertainty, and high cost. In international terms, the Javelin Park waste to energy plany will be puny, high cost and the county not fit to let or manage this contract. Given the sorry state of the available technical and contractual expertise in government at all levels, it is a sad sad story - in Japan the local council leader would have committed Hara Kiri by now.”

“I'm confused by something that's being claimed in several posts here.

How will an incinerator increase problems relating to the number of vehicles compared with the current set-up? Surely the same amount of waste is collected using the same number of lorries and those lorries take the waste to a site - just as they do today. The location of the incinerator itself could - in theory - cause traffic problems but wouldn't that be offset by the removal of any existing problems caused by the same vehicles use the current sites?

Basically, as far as I can see and putting aside all other arguments - the same waste is transported roughly the same distance as it is today. Once there, the waste is burned in a protected system and the volume of waste is massively reduced - that is then taken to a much smaller landfill site which requires far less attention and heavy equipment to level and maintain. During the process, "embedded" metals and other valuable and potentially harmful materials that would normally be buried in a landfill are not burnt and can be extracted for recycling or secure disposal. We get one "factory" in place of a whole load of landfills - and we see a chimney rather than having millions of tons of dangerous, non-degradable waste buried out of sight as a problem for the next generation to worry about.

I grew up in Derby in the 1960 and all we had was "The Tip" - a massive area on the outskirts of town where all the waste from the area was just dumped - everything from food to bikes and furniture. There were acres of land that was nothing but a giant, stinking cesspit. When the incinerator was built, that whole mess was replaced by a small, relatively tidy and clean site. The land that had previously been used as Derby's toilet was landscaped - a college built on one part of it and the rest became a popular recreation area adjacent to the River Derwent. As an "outsider" to Gloucester (although I've been here 20 years now), it's always struck me that the county - not just the City - is blighted by having that huge dumping ground where rubbish is "forgotten" simply because most people can't see it.

I'd also add that I've watched that dump from an office window in town and seen the swarms of seagulls it attracts. Getting rid of that mess is very likely to make a huge impact on those flying rats and the problems they cause.

I agree that there needs to be stringent control of emissions and that issues such as access and the effects on local properties and roads needs to be considered carefully but I fail to see how a well designed and properly run incinerator plant is in any way less desirable than a huge, stinking rubbish dump half a mile from the City centre and so close to a developing residential area.”

“How many times..?

Ask your county councillors, the ones who claim to have opposed this scheme, what objections they actually presented to the council planners? If those objections included all the stuff that gets rehashed when TiG publishes another article about the incinerator, ask them how the council responded? I didn't even get past step 1 with my Labour councillor.

When Labour controlled the council, they wanted incineration, and the Tories opposed it, actually stopped it, in fact. Now their positions are reversed, but we know they *both* want it, whatever the public are told.”

“Of course Peiro will say concerns over health are unfounded... he and his company stand to make a fortune if this project is allowed to go ahead.
The fact is that they cannot prove it is safe... instead they have employed highly paid "specialists" to tell the public what Urbaser, Balfour Beatty and GCC want to be believed... so they can get on with tapping into this 25-year goldmine at public expense.
They are "interpreting" non-committed official positions on health risk to mean that there is definitely no risk. That is an assumption too far. In addition to highly questionable processes aimed at railroading through a seriously faulty proposal, the Council (supported by their co-conspirators Urbaser and Balfour Beatty) are being reckless with a critical issue of public health.
I say "co-conspirators" advisedly, since all three parties now have a clear financial interest in the plant being built, because GCC have now signed a penalty contract which protects UBB against losses (at the expense of GCC) if the project now fails.
The sinister truth about that initiative was that, although vast sums of public money are now at risk and strong public opposition was expressed, the details of the arrangement have been kept secret by GCC.
The guilt runs deep ! ... Where might corruption come into play ?”