Open letter to the County Council about the proposed incinerator
April 26, 2011 11:37 AM
To: Herts Waste Partnership Cllrs
HCC Cabinet
CC: Local Press
26th April 2011
Dear County Councillor
We are writing to request that you delay your decision on the proposal for an incinerator in Hertfordshire, scheduled for 28th Apri
The government's review on its waste strategy is due out in May and the review may well have changes and recommendations which the people of Hertfordshire would expect you to take into account before committing to a 25 year contract at significant expense to council tax payers at a time of economic cuts.
A delay would also enable you to benefit from a visit by waste expert Dr Paul Connett in May.
A number of councils, such as Lancashire, have opted to avoid mass burn incineration. In Lancashire, with a population of 1.4million, the county council opted several years ago to avoid incineration because there was a clearly no wish for it, and they are planning, with only moderate rates of kerbside recycling (56% by 2015 and 61% by 2020), and using mechanical sorting and AD of residual waste in 2 waste processing parks, for overall recycling and composting of 81% by 2015 and 88% by 2020. They will generate 102 million cubic meters of methane per year, generate 12,700 MWh of electricity from it, and plan to use the compost like material for the planting of 2.5million trees in the county over the next 25 years - thus locking up even more carbon both in the ground and in the form of trees, instead of releasing it to air by burning.
The advantage of a strategy such as this is that it would be moving the management of waste up the waste hierarchy, maximising recovery of materials without destroying them, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, creating jobs, reducing pollution, tackling waste minimisation and reducing landfill. The use of more flexible technologies than incineration will allow the county to adapt to changing trends in waste arisings, recycling levels and increased value of recyclate. It would also be very much in harmony with the ultimate aims of your waste management core strategy, which a strategy including incineration is not.
We would also like to draw your attention to a visit from Dr Paul Connett, an internationally recognised expert on waste management with particular reference to zero waste strategies. He will be visiting Hertfordshire on May 9th and will be giving a talk that evening in Hatfield to which you and your colleagues are invited, but you may prefer to arrange a private meeting with him at County Hall at your convenience. Dr Connett is a graduate of Cambridge University and holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Dartmouth College. For more than 20 years he taught chemistry at St. Lawrence University in New York State where he specialised in Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology and over the past 25 years his research on waste management has taken him to 49 states in the US, and 52 other countries, where he has given over 2000 pro bono public presentations. He has recently been working with the UN Sustainability Commission on zero-waste. US Presidential candidate Ralph Nader said of Paul Connett, "He is the only person I know who can make waste interesting."
Please let us know if you would like to benefit from the opportunity of meeting Professor Connett before taking your decision.
This is an extremely important decision for the County Council, and one with significant financial as well as environmental implications. I urge you to delay by one month so that you are able to fully consider the matter in the light of these events.
Yours sincerely
Nigel Quinton
Louise Lotz
Any responses please to Nigel Quinton, 29 Lemsford Village, Welwyn Garden City, Herts AL8 7TN
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