Last week Suffolk County Council’s Cabinet approved the final draft for the waste plan.  This document, which contains the details on potential sites for waste treatment facilities, will eventually go to public consultation.

This gives the public across Suffolk an opportunity to have their say on the waste plan in Suffolk.  The plan itself is available online at http://apps2.suffolk.gov.uk/cgi-bin/committee_xml.cgi?p=detail&id=1_12901.  Here you will see that the County Council has assessed five different sites for a waste treatment facility. One of these – the current County transport depot at Great Blakenham – has already been announced as a site for an incinerator.

We don’t know what may be put on the other four sites as the Conservative run County Council are leaving this decision to private companies. They will decide whether they want to use the environmentally friendly Advanced Mechanical Biological Treatment or the euphemistically named “Energy from Waste” ie Waste Incinerators.

All is not lost, however, as the public has yet to speak on any of these sites.

We strongly oppose waste incineration as a means of disposal and encourage you to back our petition (http://suffolkcclibdems.org)  and to submit your own response to the consultation. 

The timetable is as follows:

1. Consultation begins at the end of July and ends in early October.
2. The Waste Core Strategy document will be brought back to the County Council in December this year.
3. A further 6 week period follows for formal representations before submission to Government in late February/early March.
4. An Examination in Public is currently scheduled to take place in June 2010.

Liberal Democrats Campaign against a Waste Incinerator in Suffolk

We call for a public inquiry on these potential incinerators, so that there is a fair chance for residents in Suffolk to have their say!

We are concerned that waste incinerators;

• Are harmful to health

• Undermine efforts to recycle

• Contribute significantly to CO2 emissions which runs counter to the Greenest County ambitions.

• Burn rare resources which cannot be recovered.

• Tie Suffolk County Council and any successor authority into a 30 year contract.

• Need a constant volume of waste to burn, with the result that large quantities of waste will need to be imported from other parts of the country in order to make up the volume.

These we believe are essential reasons for opposing an incinerator in suffolk.

Links to other pages on Incineration

Please also find other links to websites containing information about incineration.

Friends of the Earth – Dirty Truths report.

Friends of the Earth – Incineration and Health report.

Cambridgeshire County Council diagram of Mechanical Biological Treatment.