Whichever firm is brought in to run a new incinerator near Cannock would have the option to change its location, it has emerged.
However, Staffordshire County Council says there is only a small risk of this happening.
The council has announced plans to build a waste incinerator at Four Ashes Industrial Estate which would handle 300,000 tonnes of rubbish every year.
Now it has admitted that the firm selected to build and operate the plant could decide to move it elsewhere.
The council has already purchased a parcel of land off Enterprise Drive, Four Ashes, where it wants the facility built. This is part of a plan to make the Four Ashes site the best location but the firm taking on the project could decide otherwise.
Bosses at the council have embarked on an information campaign to inform local people about the plans.
The council is hoping to submit a planning application in March, and if it is given planning permission by South Staffordshire Council, the plan will then go out to tender.
This means the council will search for a company to run the incinerator, which could generate electricity for 20,000 homes, and hand the project over to them.
The incinerator is seen as a key tool for the county to reduce the amount of rubbish going into landfill.
5 Comments
The electoral wards around, and downwind of, incinerators always have high rates of infant mortality.
I’ve examined Office for National Statistics data around twenty-five incinerators in England & Wales and the infant mortality rates are always higher on the downwind sides compared with upwind. Surely someone in Stoke-on-Trent, or Wolverhampton has already spotted that before me?
In London, there are 625 electoral wards and sixty-two of them had infant mortality rates in the four-year period 2003-6 that are greater than 9.0 per 1,000 live births.
These high infant death wards are clearly associated with PM2.5 emissions from one or more incinerator and the average infant mortality rate in these 62 wards is 11.1 per 1,000 live births.
London also has 101 electoral wards with infant mortality rates less than 2.0 per 1,000 in the same four-year period. These low infant mortality wards are all clearly free from incinerator emissions and have an average infant mortality rate of 1.0 per 1,000.
Dr Dick van Steenis MBBS and I were featured in the Stafford Post of 21 November 2007,in the front page article “Suicides ‘linked’ to power station”.
There is a huge differential in the infant mortality rates in the electoral wards around Ironbridge power station with the downwind zone having a much higher rate than the upwind group of wards.
Kind regards,
Michael Ryan,
Shrewsbury
Maybe one of the planners would like it in their back garden?
Plasma gasification is safer and cheaper than incineration and produces no toxic ash which has to be landfilled.
The City of Ottawa and St Lucie County, Florida are having plasma gasification. Why are UK Councils signing up for 27-year PFI incinerator contracts when safer and cheaper technplogy is available?
Michael Ryan,
Shrewsbury
The Environment Agency have rescinded the incinerator permit in Newhaven, following successful High Court challenge on carbon dioxide emissions.
Articles in Sussex press today.
Michael Ryan,
Shrewsbury
Your article regarding the incineration burning of waste for Staffordshire ruffles the feathers with many of us here. The notion that Staffordshire CC’s officers and Councillors can roughshod their will over the Public’s wishes must not be allowed to happen. We all know Incineration Plants [no matter how they are dressed up] create Dioxins as well as liberate profuse amounts of heavy metals and arsenic into the atmosphere. All of these are carcinogenic. If you burn municipal solid waste materials at high temperatures [regardless of how clever you are at pre-separation of the front-ended recyclables in MRF/MBT (Materials Recovery Facilities or Mechanical Biological/Pre-Separation Technology) plants] you will leave materials behind which will be burnt. From these Dioxins will be generated. The one thing we all know as learned persons is that Dioxins can be detected at very low levels and that they are Carcinogenic at the point of detection. There are no safe limits for Dioxin emissions from incineration. If there are then why isit that the plant is not built next to the houses where the Councillors and the Staffordshire Staff and Directors live!
What surprises most of us in Staffordshire is the fact that apart from the environmental nonsense of choosing an incineration plant as the favoured method for treating the residual waste it is the most expensive option. With Staffordshire CC knowing that the capital cost is currently uncapped at £158 million (and likely to rise) and a total cost of £630 million over a 35 year operating period it knows already that the Public the Tax Payers can’t afford such a bill. But there is more bad news to come, within 8 years of the project coming on line Staffordshire CC Council Tax payers will be asked to fork out a further £80 to £100 million to deal with capturing the Carbon Dioxide and other green house gases emitted from the plant under already planned International Legislation. Who is going to pay for this incompetence not the Councillors and not the Council Staff or their advising Consulting Engineers but Muggings the Council Tax Payers.
In a recent Contractor’s day meeting briefed by Staffordshire earlier this year the attending contractors were quietly told by the Directorate of Staffordshire and Their Advisors that Staffordshire has Planning under control. In other words Staffordshire County Council as Planning Authority will approve Planning for their own project! That must be wrong! How can the Poacher and Game Keeper be the same person? The Public must fight this tooth and nail. The people around Four Ashes and Wolverhampton and Cannock must fight this. Perhaps the one chance they now have is the County Elections where every Candidate who has stated he will approve the project can be voted out by the Public.
So what if any are the options here for this part of Staffordshire? Well there are already Councils in the UK like Brighton and East Sussex, Hull, West Sussex, parts of Scotland, places like Malaysia and the Philippines and the USA who are coming round to the idea that there are available technologies around that can treat the waste for less than 30% of the above figures and that they can convert the residual waste to usable products and alternative fuels like Diesel or Petrol that do not require massive subsidies. If these are being used and proposed for Indiana and Canada then why not for us in Staffordshire. All we ask is for realism here and the application of logic. Mr Ryan from Shrewsbury like his counterparts in Nottingham and Brighton/East Sussex and Hull ha point here. Staffordshire should not follow the path that has caused so much grief elsewhere and should abandon their folly of incineration for something that is far far better.