Leicester FoE welcomes new rubbish facility

Local environmental group welcome new waste facility and renew their call to scrap plans for a big new incinerator as a ground-breaking ceremony takes place to officially start work on a new rubbish-sorting plant.

Leicester Friends of the Earth have welcomed the start of work on a new rubbish processing facility, at Cotesbach, near Lutterworth. The plant will be what is known as a mechanical and biological treatment (MBT) plant, able to recover and recycle most of the material in unsorted waste.

It is the kind of plant that Friends of the Earth have been arguing for, to process all of Leicestershire’s unsorted waste and the start of work on this facility has prompted them to renew their call for the County Council to choose this type of technology to deal with all their unsorted waste, rather than their currently favoured option of building a big new incinerator, to burn most of it.

The new facility near Lutterworth will use technology provided by New Earth Solutions. Once completed it will divert from landfill some 40,000 tons of the County’s waste every year, saving the County Council landfill tax and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite the availability of this kind of technology, the County Council are still saying that their preferred long-term option for dealing with most of the County’s waste remains incineration and Whetstone and Bardon have been identified as possible sites for a big new incinerator.

Friends of the Earth agree with the County Council that it is vital that we drastically reduce the amount of rubbish that is being sent to landfill, but believe that incineration is probably the worst possible way of doing this:

1. Incineration wastes lots of potentially valuable materials;
2. Although the County Council are talking of combining incineration with power generation, this is a very inefficient way of producing electricity and it is far better to save the energy already incorporated in recoverable materials; and to process the organic component to produce fertilizer and bio-gas gas, to use as a fuel;
3. Incineration is plagued with problems in controlling dangerous emissions and produces ash that has to be disposed of as hazardous waste;
4. Incinerators are expensive, inflexible and take a long time to bring into operation. In addition, the need to guarantee enough unsorted waste to make it economically viable creates pressure not to do everything possible to reduce waste and promote recycling;
5. Incinerators need to be big to be economic, creating very heavy traffic around one site. Mechanical and biological treatment plants can be smaller, which would allow processing to be spread over several sites. This would avoid any community having to put up with too heavy traffic.

Malcolm Hunter, a spokesperson for Leicester Friends of the Earth, said:

“Mechanical and biological treatment is already used in the City and this new MBT plant in the County is very welcome. The County Council should think again about its longer term plans and go down the MBT route for treating all the County’s unsorted waste. As well as being better for the environment, further MBT plants could be built more quickly than an incinerator and processing could be spread over several sites, avoiding the local traffic problems that a single big incinerator would cause”.