The Cornish Energy Recovery Centre
Cornwall, like the rest of Great Britain, is storing up an energy and landfill crisis. Each household in Cornwall, on average, generated 366.92kg of rubbish last year. Translated across the county this becomes an enormous amount for the country to process. Not many of us wish to see the continued use of landfill with the potential to ruin the Cornish countryside. Time is running out to find a sustainable solution as it is predicted that landfill space will run out by 2014.
To be fair to the Council there has been a solid attempt to encourage household recycling. Although, it would appear that this is more to do with cost than environment. In August 2010 the Saltash Journal reported that each black bag took £2 to process whilst recycling bags only took £0.41. This makes black bags nearly five times as expensive as ‘non-traditional’ waste.
On the 28th April 2008 SITA Cornwall Ltd submitted an application to build the Cornish Energy Recovery Centre (CERC). To be based at Roswell Farm near St Austell would have been able to provide power for around 21,000 homes and stop 240,000 tones of waste from heading to Landfill sites around Cornwall. Not an insignificant amount at all.
The planning application, released by SITA, took great pains to making the facility fit into the local environment. SITA stated that ‘The design strategy for the CERC has focused on creating a high quality innovative proposal, whilst being sympathetic to its surroundings. As a result the scale and shape of the building have been devised to fit with the surrounding topography and recognise the character and sensitivity of its landscape setting’. Of course, the buildings would be made from the standard industrial materials of steel and concrete; but the application promised to fit into the local environment with plants, native trees, and the construction of 1km of Cornish hedges.
The company did, however, make the honest admission that even these efforts would only shield the ground level activities from site and would not cover the whole site. The local population would only be able to see the roof and some of the walling of the two building facility. Although, this could not really be considered a problem considering similar buildings such as Ginisters in Callington which has no shielding from view at all.
Given this it is remarkable that Council have rejected planning permission partly (in March 2009) on the grounds that ‘The proposal would have an unacceptable impact on residential amenity due to noise both during the... operational stage’. In addition the Council also rejected the proposal on the grounds that ‘The proposal by virtue of its scale, size and proximity to surrounding areas would have significant adverse impacts upon the environment and setting of those areas’. Such environmental projects were designed to cover the damage from the china clay industry; such projects include this one which replanted many native trees but hardly seems a serious reason to hinder this necessary development.
The great irony is that this project designed to stop waste from getting to landfill was seemingly stopped by a desire to fill the holes left by china clay which many soon be needed again for landfill! The closure of the Native Mines landfill site in October 2009 ( 7 months after the rejected proposal) started a clock ticking to the end of Cornish landfill and the need for such facilities to be built to deal with our waste. The other irony, of course, is that the facility would have provided at least 48 full time jobs that could have replace those formerly in the china clay industry - not a bad dead in the current climate of public sector cuts.
It also seems remarkable that the Council rejected the proposal on the grounds that ‘The proposed development would be contrary to sustainable development objectives by its dependence on the transportation of waste by road, and increasing distances between the origin of waste and its disposal’. How else do they expect waste to be transported? Waste is already transported by road all over the country and the Council seem to expect SITA to devise some new strategy for its transport! SITA's evidence shows that they had plans to build a private road so lorries would avoid public roads (principally, the A30) and that the close proximity to the rail network gave much potential for the use of rail transport in the futire. To again draw the comparison with Ginsters, that company uses heavy transport to move its products, but there is barely a complaint about it – despite driving through several residential areas and on public roads.
On the other hand, it is possible to see the Council’s point of view. They are concerned that this waste centre will increase the level of heavy traffic and will not fit into the local countryside. Even a private road will not completely remove the additional strain on the current network. The Council have also set up various localised recycling centres for household waste allowing lots of its processing at site. Such sites make a useful contribution but do not do enough to reduce the level of landfill.
Probably bowing to local pressure and faced with actually having to make a hard decision the Council chose the short term and easy option. That they advised SITA to appeal and that their appeal would probably be successful suggests that the Council wanted the site but were not prepared themselves to bear the responsibility for its approval.
In the long term, this is a site that is badly needed. The Cornish countryside cannot continue to absorb growing amounts of landfill. The decision of the Council to reject the SITA proposal shows that we are not yet ready to tackle the many environmental problems we face head on.
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