Coventry City Council has opened its consultation into the draft municipal waste strategy. Coventry plans to achieving a 50% recycling rate by 2020. One of the main focuses of the draft document is on reducing the amount of waste going to the city’s ageing incinerator, which is owned and managed by local firm Coventry and Solihull Waste and Disposal Company and currently deals with 64% of Coventry’s 180,000 tonnes of annual household waste.
Anti-incineration campaigners in Coventry have pointed out that the City Council’s consultation questionnaire only gives the option of co-mingled waste collections which mean that less can be recycled due to contamination and a more expensive sorting process.
The council intends to decrease the amount of waste it sends to the incinerator by 2020 through putting more efforts into waste prevention, reuse and recycling, and explore developing a more environmentally-friendly waste management infrastructure within the West Midlands, as the incinerator has been running for over 30 years.
In the proposed framework, the Council said: “A cornerstone of the waste strategy is that by 2020 the city will be recycling and composting more of its household waste than it treats through energy recovery.” According to LetsRecycle: “proposals to replace the existing recovery centre when it reaches the end of its operational life have been discussed as part of a Coventry collaboration with Warwickshire County Council and Solihull council under a joint bid for PFI support called ‘Project Transform'”.
In documentation for the bid, which has had its Expression of Interest approved by Defra, the Councils’ forecast capital expenditure of £197 million for a new “energy-from-waste facility capable” of “treating” 350,000 tonnes of residual waste built on the site of Coventry’s existing facility.
Companies thought to be in the running to operate the new facility include Viridor and Veolia. To support the campaign for better alternatives to incineration for Coventry visit Coalition for Recycling and Against Coventry Incinerator (CRACIN) and Coventry Friends of the Earth websites.