Consultation on Javelin Park incinerator permit

A public consultation on the Environment Agency’s (EA’s) draft decision to grant an environmental permit to Urbaser Balfour Beatty’s (UBB) Javelin Park energy-from-waste (EfW) incinerator opened yesterday (20 February), to allow the public a chance to ’raise any relevant matter’ regarding the proposed Gloucestershire plant.

In order for the 190,000 tonnes plant to be built, it must first receive a permit from the Environment Agency (EA).

In its consultation documentation, the EA said it had come to a draft decision to grant permission to the plant but that it was holding off on reaching a final decision until members of the public had a chance to submit ’any further comments which may affect [its] decision’.

‘We have assessed the application and taken into account comments received from consultees and members of the public during the first stage of consultation. On that basis we have now reached our draft decision’, the EA document reads.

‘We are minded to grant the permit to the applicant… Before we make this decision we want to explain our thinking to the public and other interested parties, to give them a chance to understand our thinking, and, if they wish, to make relevant representation to us. We will make our final decision only after carefully taking into account any relevant matter raised in the responses we receive. Out mind remains open at this stage.’

The consultation will run for seven weeks until 12 April and a drop in session for the public will be held at 3pm on 12 March at Stonehouse Town Hall in Gloucestershire.

Read the draft decision consultation documentation.

The contract

Gloucestershire County Council awarded UBB the contract to build the EfW plant in September 2012. The 25-year waste contract, estimated to be worth approximately £500 million, will see the site process up to 190,000 tonnes of residual waste a year, with the aim of reducing the amount of refuse sent to landfill.

On its website, UBB claimed that the site will prevent ‘over 92 per cent of Gloucestershire’s residual waste’ from being sent to landfill, saving local taxpayers £190 million over 25 years.

“With the potential to save Gloucestershire County Council and its taxpayers £190 million over 25 years, providing enough electricity for 25,000 homes and diverting many thousands of tonnes of waste from landfill, the Javelin Park project is an important issue for the county”, the company said in a statement on its website.

Artist's impression of the Javelin Park incinerator

Opposition

However, the park has met with local opposition over fears on residents’ health the environment.

The news of EA’s draft decision comes just hours before a meeting at Stroud District Council (SDC) to decide whether the council will withhold its waste from Gloucestershire County Council (GCC), in opposition to the incinerator.

Green Party councillor Martin Whiteside, is to put forward the motion calling for SDC to dispose of its waste in a more ‘environmentally friendly way’. Labour councillor Paul Denney has seconded the motion.

According to Councillor Whiteside: "We need to investigate ways of recycling much more, avoiding an expensive, inflexible, 25-year incineration contract. The smart solution for the future should be good for the environment and good for the pockets of hard pressed council taxpayers."

This follows a similar move by the borough council of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk which withdrew from Norfolk County Council’s waste strategy (which included incineration) and withheld black bin waste from them in order to process their recycling themselves.

Cotswold district and Cirencester town councillor John Hughes, has also added his voice to the growing opposition, telling the Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard, that he feared for the health of his residents (based 18 miles from the plant).

"Our taxes are paying for this and our waste will probably be sent there to be burned", he stated. "The air pollution plume that will come out of this horrendously big chimney will travel over a 25 mile radius, so it’s definitely a Cirencester issue."

However, Javier Peiro, Project Director for UBB said that there will be no visible ‘smoke’ from the stack and that “the only thing that may occasionally be visible is steam, which even in the worst case weather conditions would not extend more than 262m from the stack".

Petition for public inquiry

A growing number of councils, residents and organisations are now calling on Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles to ‘call in’ the EfW planning application for public inquiry.

Over 3,000 individuals, 13 local parish, town and district councils and organisations including Natural England, English Heritage, The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) and Friends of the Earth have written to government to call in the plans, with a separate petition having already fetched over 1,000 signatories

According to Friends of the Earth Gloucestershire, the incinerator “‘would burn recyclable materials and discourage recycling, produce persistent organic pollutants in its residues and cost local taxpayers around £500 million over 25 years”.

It asks that government look at “cheaper, safer, less visually intrusive, environmentally friendly alternatives such as small MBT (mechanical biological treatment) and AD (anaerobic digestion) plants” to treat the area’s residual waste.

UBB has issued a statement saying that the company has found the human health risk for Javelin Park to be ‘negligible’ and that its greenhouse gas assessment found that the facility would ‘reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 40,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year’.

Overcapacity

Fears over the UK’s over-reliance on incineration has gained momentum after Eunomia reported in November last year that planning consent for incinerators is being granted ‘faster than applications are being made’, and that without any change in residual waste quantities, by 2015/16, there would be ‘overcapacity of 6.9 million tonnes per annum’. This, the report adds, could lead to recyclable materials being sent to the facilities to ensure that they are running in an efficient manner.

Read more about the Javelin Park facility on UBB's website.