Join Rivenhall Incinerator demo on County Hall steps at Chelmsford at 9am on Friday 24th April

Friends of the Earth are joining the Rivenhall people at 9am on Friday 24th April on the steps of the County Hall - see James Abbott's message below. Please come to support us if you can. Press will be invited for 9.15am.

ECC so far have not had the approval from Defra - as far as we know - for the PFI funding for the 28.5 year waste contracts for two massive MBT (Mechanical Biological Treatment) plants at Basildon and Rivenhall. These would shred and compost residual 'black bag' waste, making SRF (Solid Recovered Fuel) to burn in an incinerator at Rivenhall. Lord Hanningfield, leader of Essex County Council, has pledged since 2001 that there will be no incinerator in Essex and that there would be a referendum if one was proposed.

The latest application for waste plants at Rivenhall Airfield alone, which is recommended for approval by ECC next Friday, has risen to over a million tonnes, with 360,000 tonnes of SRF to be burnt. They say they will include commercial waste and waste will come from outside Essex. The report also says they expect to enact the agreed Cory application for 250,000 tonnes p.a. MBT plants at Stanway. Yet Essex total municipal waste for 2007/8 was just 690,084 tonnes, dropping 8,600 tonnes from the previous year.

Waste is not rising in Essex or the UK, whereas a mythical 3% p.a. rise in household waste has been factored in to projections for 25 or 30 year waste disposal contracts in Essex and across the UK, which are the basis for massive overprovision for MBT plants and incinerators. Councils will be legally bound to provide the contracted disposal tonnage.

Another pledge from Lord Hanningfield is that Essex will recycle and compost 60% by 2020. Even if we only managed 60% recycling and composting over the next decade it would leave only about 280,000 tonnes p.a. to landfill from the twelve district councils.

Here is just a reminder of some of our long campaign over thirteen years since the draft Essex Waste Plan came out in 1996.....

We held our first of thirteen conferences in June 1998 called 'Is Waste a Burning Issue?' with Keith Collins and Alan Watson - of consultants 'Ecologika' - as key speakers for recycling and against incineration. Eight LibDem councillors attended, including CBC Cllr Ken Jones, also the leader of the county LibDems. They went away and reversed their previous support for incineration. By November that year the county Labour group had also changed their policy and strongly opposed incineration.

After a big rally we held outside County Hall and a conference in March 1999, the Conservatives caved in and a month later signed the 'Working Together' policy with the district councils to achieve 60% recycling and composting by 2007. This was included in the Waste Plan.

Three trials were set up to test the feasibility of 60% recycling. The Mersea area trial was the most successful, reaching 60% by 2002, with weekly kerbside collections of everything including garden waste and plastic bottles, separated at the kerbside using separate recycling boxes and bags and suitable vehicles. Colchester already collected paper, card, cans and separated colours of glass with the special 'Fame' flatback vehicle with metal stillages. The trial had 82% participation and 98% public satisfaction.

The district councils had employed Ecologika to run detailed waste analyses and draw up detailed recycling strategies for the district councils, all but one of whom joined together as the Waste Consortium and commissioned Ecologika to fight the county council at the 1999/2000 Essex Waste Plan inquiry. Unfortunately the inspector left incineration in the waste plan, although he took out some of the identified waste sites.

Colchester's LibDem MP Bob Russell hosted our 'No Incineration for Essex' first Parliamentary meeting at Westminster, with speakers from across the UK. There was crossparty support and an anti-incineration rally outside Westminster with groups from all over the UK.

The Conservatives were elected in a landslide victory in 2001 on a vociferous anti-incineration campaign and manifesto. As James Abbott says below, Lord Hanningfield on many occasions pledged there would be no incineration and that if it was proposed there would be a referendum.

At their first three meetings the county council Conservatives alone approved the Waste Plan including incineration, saying they were legally required to include it. This was not true and 'an unprecedented number' of letters, including from seven district councils, were received by Michael Meacher's office asking the Government to call the decision in. These were passed to the GoEast office to deal with, where Geoff Gardner, ECC's officer and author of the Waste Plan, rejected this bid, acting as GoEast's advisor.

Three individuals (two councillors and me) took ECC to the High Court in March 2002 and proved there is no such legal requirement. You must have a plan for dealing with waste but it does not have to include incineration. However, Judge Sullivan decided the new Conservative councillors knew they could include or exclude incineration when they rubberstamped the Waste Plan so he considered it was valid and refused to dislodge it.

We had to raise £28,000 to cover the costs of the challenge which was raised with individual and group donations from across the UK, including £2000 from each of the three individuals, with many individual donations from £5 to £2000.

The opposition Labour and LibDem groups put a motion to full council following the High Court decision, to amend the Waste Plan to exclude incineration, but the huge majority of ruling Conservatives threw out the motion.

In June 2002 Colchester FoE had launched the Zero Waste Charter at Westminster, hosted by the LibDem national waste spokesperson MP Sue Doughty. We held a colourful rally with other UK anti-incineration groups in front of Westminster, including our red Incinerator dragon. The first councils in the UK to formally adopt the Zero Waste Charter were Braintree's Labour council and the LibDem Chelmsford council.

At the end of 2002 the Essex War on Waste public consultation offered six MBT and incineration options. We drew up alternative 'Option 7' with councillors, which supported the Zero Waste Charter, and we held stalls in the main towns offering all the options. Option 7 was recognised and counted by the consultant running the Essex WoW consultation. 69% of formal responses supported Option 7 and 76% opposed all six official options. Braintree council and twelve out of fifteen parish councils formally supported Option 7.

Since then these two councils and all Essex districts were taken over by Conservative administrations which support the county's waste plans. By December 2005 ECC had lodged their bid to Defra for PFI funding. However, the rules for PFI changed in early 2006 which required 'broad public support' for PFI bids, and for all the district councils to support the bid.

In May 2007, just after the major district council elections, the Outline Business Case for the PFI waste bid was released. It showed that the proposed MBT plants at Basildon and Rivenhall Airfield would shred and dry black bag waste and produce fuel pellets to burn in an incinerator. The incinerator was placed 'for modelling purposes' at Rivenhall Airfield, but it could be on any of the identified sites including Stanway, or Sandon at Chelmsford.

So ECC required all the district councils to formally support the PFI bid by July 2007, which they did. They also had to try to get public support with their widely condemned new trick consultation in February 2008. It was decorated with green fields and butterflies, and managed to elicit public support for incineration of the MBT residues in the woolly description as 'fuel for energy'.

Colchester opposition councillors pledged to oppose the waste strategy and PFI bid in July 2007 when it was agreed by Colchester's Tory council. They joined various demos we held around Colchester. In May 2008 the Conservatives lost five seats, with waste being one of the issues. The new coalition administration immediately formally opposed the Essex waste strategy and adopted Option 7 in its place. They later formally reversed the previous Conservative's support for the PFI bid.

ECC has lost years and years over this whole process because of the continuing dogged opposition at every stage. They are at one of the last application stages for PFI now before they offer the contracts in the EU journals. Many people have objected to the latest PFI application including through their MPs Angela Smith for Basildon and Bob Russell for Stanway at Colchester. We have pointed out that the PFI bid does not have 'broad public support' and one council has opposed it.

Paula Whitney, Co-ordinator,
Colchester & NE Essex Friends of the Earth.

Stop the Incinerator on Rivenhall Airfield - CRUNCH TIME

18th April 2009

Dear All

Its crunch time.

The waste site and incinerator application is to go to committee on Friday 24th April, 10am County Hall (entrance via Duke Street). We do not expect anything other than a rubberstamping of the officer recommendation to approve, despite the overwhelming level of opposition and the clear policy breaches - the latest count is well over 800 objections from residents, councils and organisations.

Its not the end of the story though. We are preparing a file to go to Go-East urging a public planning inquiry - time is short though - we have probably less than 2 weeks. Part of that submission will be a short letter, signed by as many councillors and representatives of organisations as we can muster. If you are either a councillor or represent an organisation, and/or can ask others in those catagories to sign, please get in touch as soon as possible. We already have the support of Lady Newton, Chair of BDC who said she will sign, along with many other parish and district councillors.

Please also now send the petitions to Go-East either direct - or to me and I will forward them.

There will be a peaceful, colourful protest on the steps of County Hall (main entrance) starting at 9am on Friday 24th. The press will be invited. Please do try and attend - we appreciate its early but we have to have it then as the meeting starts at 10am. We will bring plenty of the campaign placards and posters plus our new "Bank of Lord H" mock bank notes which emphasise that should these plans go through it would be a blatant breach of the pledges he personally made in the House of Lords and in letters to residents - and in the press - that there would be "No incineration without a referendum" in Essex (direct quote from Lords Hansard).

We have now posted some of the airfield photos and descriptions to a website. Owing to the amount of information and file sizes, it has not been possible so far to put them all up, and those we have put up have had to be reduced - but we are working on it. Also, the only site we have available, and the only peron offering to do this work, means it is on the Witham and Braintree Green Party site. Apologies if that is a problem, as we said, and remains the case, we are committed to keeping the campaign as cross-community as possible. If we get an offer for an independent hosting of the pictures, we will of course take it up. The link to the page is http://witham-braintree.greenparty.org.uk/localsites/witham-braintree/news/new-pictures-show-scale-of-environmental-threat.html

If you want any of the pictures sent direct by e-mail, we can do that on request. The web pages do not cover all the images, but they do cover most of the vantage points.

Finally, thank you once again to everyone who is helping the campaign. Please feel free to forward this to anyone you think can attend on the 24th or who can sign the letter.

For further information, please contact

James Abbott

01376 584576
07951 923073

For updates on the local campaign and national campaigns against incinerators, please visit
www.bugleonline.co.uk
and www.ukwin.org.uk