Issues

Waste

CPRE Surrey has long expressed its concerns about Surrey County Council’s declared intention to build mass burn incinerators in the county as a way of dealing with the county’s residual waste. A planning application was submitted by the County Council’s waste contractors – Surrey Waste Management (SWM) – in October 2007, even though the Planning Inspector who spent much of the year examining the county’s Waste Plan had yet to report on his findings.

CPRE has consistently argued that major waste management facilities should not be constructed in the countryside. Waste residues should be treated in industrial buildings in urban areas, preferably on industrial estates. Recent advances in waste management technologies make this a feasible and viable proposition. Using urban industrial areas to accommodate waste facilities not only protects the countryside. It also satisfies the proximity and polluter pays principles and it reduces the number and length of waste-related heavy goods vehicle journeys. As it is most unlikely that something of the scale and size of an incinerator could be satisfactorily accommodated on an industrial estate, CPRE Surrey has recommended that a number of alternative waste management technologies should be examined by the County Council, including mechanical biological treatment (MBT), anaerobic digestion, autoclaving, materials recovery facilities, and in-vessel composting.

 

Nevertheless, SWM has applied to build what would be the first municipal waste incinerator in Surrey adjacent to the Clockhouse Brickworks at Capel, very close to Surrey’s southern boundary with West Sussex. The Capel Incinerator, which will cost £50 million to construct, would handle around 110,000 tonnes of residual waste each year for at least twenty five years, about 40% of Surrey’s overall future requirements – according to the county at least one more, larger incinerator will also be needed somewhere else in Surrey.

 

The Capel site adjoins open countryside and is close to a number of homes. The proposals include a seventy metre tall emissions stack and a thirty five metre high incinerator building. On a typical weekday, the site would generate around seventy movements by heavy goods vehicles, starting early in the morning, bringing waste onto the site and removing bottom ash and fly ash. Nearly thirty thousand tonnes of bottom ash would still need to be landfilled each year following incineration. Enough electricity to serve the needs of eight thousand homes would be generated at the facility.

 

Capel seems a strange place to locate any facility designed to serve the needs of two fifths of Surrey’s population. It is right on the county boundary in an entirely rural area well away from any centres of population and some distance from any motorway. The nearby A24 is only single carriageway at the point where it passes the proposed incinerator site and the road is narrow and winding in places. Bulk Transfer Vehicles bringing rubbish from Guildford, Epsom and Leatherhead will have long journeys to make to Capel. It seems at least a possibility that the Capel site will, in the event, be used to incinerate municipal refuse from parts of West Sussex, a county which has no plans itself to build incinerators.

 

Incinerators are large and intrusive features in the countryside and they are designed to run continuously. The incinerator will be visible from parts of the Green Belt, from the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and from Areas of Great Landscape Value to the north west of the incinerator, although it is claimed that intervening vegetation will, to some extent, screen the site. As the planning application’s Environmental Statement says – “it is not possible to totally screen the EfW plant.” (EfW, which stands for “Energy from Waste” is the somewhat misleading term used in the application for the mass burn incinerator!)

 

Those seeking to enjoy the nearby countryside and those with homes in the vicinity will experience noise, atmospheric emissions and light pollution from the facility at all times of the day and night – the Environmental Statement accompanying the planning application admits that the county’s own night time noise criteria will be exceeded at three houses close to the incinerator. It can be anticipated that the lighting around the plant will be a particularly intrusive feature.

 

SWM states that the incinerator and associated infrastructure would take two years to build and they hope the facility will be operational by 2011. All past experience suggests that, even if the county does eventually approve the incinerator (and SWM are, after all, employed by the County Council), judicial processes could well delay the construction and commissioning of the incinerator by several years. It is worth noting that the Allington incinerator in Kent, near Maidstone, where a significant amount of Surrey’s waste is currently sent, has run into significant technical problems at the time of commissioning.

CPRE Surrey will be objecting to the planning application for the Capel incinerator and will be closely monitoring developments in the months and years to come.

 

Tim Murphy