Jun 242008
21st June 2008
Dear Editor,
Once again the shambles which is Wiltshire’s waste policy is exposed and the choices made by Andy Conn as Wiltshire’s Waste Manager and Toby Sturgis the political waste guru are under the spotlight.
Firstly we have the four year on/off contractual MBT plant debate for the Northacre Estate, Westbury with the elusive Ensorgia Italian company failing to deliver on promises of oversight so that the SRFcan be verified as being up to production specification.It may interest your readers to know that no official has been to see an Ensorgia plant so we can verify that this company can deliver on what they say. Talk about buying a pig in a poke.
Then we have Hills our county wide waste services provider under review by Defra for data irregularities. Of all the companies we could have chosen Wiltshire chose a private company who expanded in importance on the back of this county contract. Hills have also failed to deliver on promises to be open and accountable on the issue of this MBT plant.
Now comes the year’s delay to the incinerator being built in Colnbrook, Slough Berkshire which was meant to take 50,000 tonnes p.a. of so called residual waste from Salisbury. Now that cannot happen for at least a year and our county is scrabbling around seeking alternatives for this amount of waste. If Andy Conn had promoted anaerobic digestion for food waste incorporating this with county wide programme for composting we could have had a cleaner advantageous soil improvement programme for Wiltshires farms. Add to that a WRAP programme for plastic recycling and reprocessing then incineration options would never have figured as our solutions
I think the time has come to remove these Wiltshire Officials and re-evaluate the ways and means of dealing with our waste as matter of urgency. We have one contract not signed and one contract which the operator is in breach of delivery. Although I am not an expert or lawyer in these matters I do know as an interested party that there are cheaper alternatives to our county waste disposal problem and that Wiltshire’s choices to date are not value for money and therefore contravene Defra guidelines.
Yours Faithfully,
David Levy
Chair TATWBG
My husband and I were the founder members of the Air That we Breathe group in 1994
We conducted a health survey of the people of Bratton three miles down wind of the Blue Circle now Lafarge chimney and found one in three people had some form of cancer and or breathing difficulty. We were assisted by Dr George Gaines.