Concerns that incineration will crowd out recycling in London have been rejected by ministers in their long-awaited decision to back the UK’s biggest energy-from-waste plant.
Energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, last week accepted the verdict of two public inquiries in favour of a Cory Environmental plant, proposed for Belvedere in southwest London, which will burn up to 585,000t of municipal waste a year. Bexley council, London mayor Ken Livingstone local residents and environmental campaigners are implacably opposed. The waste industry, meanwhile, will hope the decision marks a new determination at government level to deliver the doubling of EfW’s market share to 25%, envisaged in its revised national waste strategy (Surveyor, 16 February).
In endorsing the findings of the 2003 inquiry re-opened last year, Wicks, declared: ‘If London was to meet the ambitious recycling targets envisaged by the mayor, there would still be ample residual waste to fuel the station.’ He also stressed that the waste – mainly from the four western boroughs of Lambeth, Wandsworth, Kensington & Chelsea, and Hammersmith & Fulham – would continue to be transported by barge, saving 100,000 lorry journeys a year. Cory, which has a 30-year contract, worth £700M, with the boroughs’ joint waste authority, has set up subsidiary Riverside Resource Recovery to develop the plant. It would generate 66MW from residual waste, displacing fossil fuels which contributed to global warming, said Cory.
Chief executive, Malcolm Ward, said the plant would help London meets its EU landfill diversion targets. ‘This will save millions of pounds in fines which would then have been levied on London council taxpayers.’ Work should start on the site in six months. Bexley leader, Cllr Ian Clement, was ‘devastated’. The council has campaigned with residents against three incinerator plans for the site since the original 1992 inquiry, although it sends some waste to an incinerator in neighbouring Lewisham. It objected to the scale of the plant and sourcing of waste from a wide area. It also argued that EfW removed the incentive to recycle.
Environmentalists and deputy London mayor Nicky Gavron attacked ‘a backward step’ in the battle against climate change. Gavron insisted that 85% of the capital’s waste could be managed by 2020 without an incinerator, calling for gasification or anaerobic digestion instead. The decision showed the need for a single waste authority, and stronger powers for the mayor, she said. Friends of the Earth said Belvedere would emit more carbon dioxide than a gas-fired power station.
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