On Friday Green Party District Councillors including me and leading Green Party activists from the District gathered at Javelin Park, Stonehouse and signed the petition opposing a county wide incinerator on the site. Photo: By local photographer Ruth Davey
You can see our press release here with comments about why incineration is not the answer - and see more about the petition on my blog here.
Other photos: John Marjoram talking to Mary Newton from Friends of the Earth, Cllrs Sarah Lunnon and Martin Whiteside signing the petition and at the bottom Ruth Davey photographer in action
As Sarah Lunnon said in the release "we are concerned that the technology will be decided by the tendering process, driven by the need to make profits. Many feel this will inevitable result in a large environmentally inefficient, inflexible incinerator which will drive waste production rather than decrease it."
There is massive opposition locally amongst all parties to a monster incinerator but some Tories are clearly moving more towards incineration - in this light it was interesting to read about the shenanigans at Bristol City council this week. The Labour council has walked out/collapsed/been shunted out (delete as per your point of view) over the household waste incinerator proposed for Avonmouth. The national campaign re incinerators said; "Efforts to educate Bristol Councillors are begining to pay off as increasing numbers vote to exclude incineration from waste plans."
I met one of the councillors who was at that meeting on Thursday...the Lib Dems and Green opposed the incinerator which has led now to Lib Dems in power and the 7th council administration in as many years! They will face many issues to resolve - not least about how to get out of the Council's initial commitments for an incinerator....we watch with interest and hopefully learn!! Good luck to them indeed.
3 comments:
See, yet another unpublicised petition stunt.
I suppose I should be grateful that Labour didn't get a look in this time, but I hope that you people, who have far better access to the county council than me, are at least trying to find out what alternatives to incineration are still under consideration.
I'm quite keen on auto claving, as it can apparently compact plastics, and plastic bottles take up far more space for their weight than anything else. Let's use them to make barels that the youth groups can use for their raft-building, councillor-taming exercises.
Apologies if this is repeated by the way, I'm having trouble remembering what combination gets a message displayed...
Sadly we still don't have a Green party County Councillor in this area but you can be assured we are pushing the alternatives hard with the County - conversations, meetings, emails, joint visits to waste alternatives by members and we helped set up the District's Advisory Panel on waste with Lib Dems:
http://ruscombegreen.blogspot.com/2008/07/glos-waste-discussed.html
Having said that as Sarah Lunnon pointed out at a recent Council meeting this hasn't met for ages yet decisions seem to be being taken by the District on waste - why? We hope to have an answer soon and hope it does not mean any change of tact re waste locally...
Good to see mention of the Strausse's Zero Waste site in that link :)
I just did a search for this debate Parmjit Dhanda is supposed to have called for in Parliament tomorrow, because I wouldn't want to miss it.
All I managed to find was this page from the Gloucester Conservatives, decrying the tactics he has use, but it does report that five possible technologies are being considered, including two types of Mechanical Biological Treatment, *and* auto claving. I'm still sticking with that one, although MBT is also well rated, as I understand.
http://www.gloucesterconservatives.com/index.php?sectionid=3&pagenumber=494
People need to pound home the message that *one* option should be preferred over incineration. Although I'm still not entirely convinced that the incineration option would necessarily be so much worse than any other. I suppose I want to shoot the GCLP's fox...
Post a Comment