Incinerator debate hotting up!

CPRE Surrey has long expressed its concern about Surrey County Council's declared intention to build mass burn incinerators as a way of dealing with the county's residual waste. Under a 25 year legally binding contract, the county authority is committed to allow two such plants to be built in Surrey

 

CPRE Surrey has long expressed its concern about Surrey County Council's declared intention to build mass burn incinerators as a way of dealing with the county's residual waste. Under a 25 year legally binding contract, the county authority is committed to allow two such plants to be built in Surrey. The first site selected is at Capel in Mole Valley for which a planning application was submitted by Surrey Waste Management in October 2007. The second is likely to be at Trumps Farm at Longcross in Runnymede. However, the Inspectors in their Report on the Surrey Waste Plan have unexpectedly refused to rule out up to 5 sites including Wisley. This unsatisfactory outcome will further raise the temperature of all concerned with the rural environment.

 

CPRE Surrey 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 as it reduces the number. Since 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 wants 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.

 

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 30,000 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 on the face of it to be a rather 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 - 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 – it is often argued that an incinerator contract works against waste recycling as, typically, it requires sufficient waste to be delivered to the plant to ensure that it can run at all times of the day and night. 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, 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 infra-structure 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 was due to be sent, ran 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.