Campaigners’ anger at incinerator costs
Saturday 13th March 2010, 11:30AM GMT.
Campaigners today gave their reaction to claims that Shropshire taxpayers will be forced to pay out nearly £11 million a year to run a controversial incinerator in the county.
A request by Safe Waste Shropshire to view the 27-year waste contract signed between Veolia and the former Shropshire County Council, has led environmental campaigners to criticise the amount they say will be forked out each year to burn waste.
Shropshire Council and Veolia have both refused to be drawn on the figures claimed by Keith Kondakor, of Friends of the Earth.
Shrewsbury MP Daniel Kawczynski today said the data obtained by Mr Kondakor was yet more reason for councillors to turn down plans for the burner in Battlefield, Shrewsbury.
He said: “This is yet further proof of how unwanted this incinerator is. It’s the wrong solution for the long term disposal of Shropshire’s waste.
“We could potentially be burning other people’s waste as well. There is no incentive whatsoever for recycling because this is going to damage our progress down the recycling route.
“I am 100 per cent opposed to this incinerator and I am very concerned that the council is still moving along with it.”
Nick Hall, a member of Safe Waste Shropshire and vice chairman of No Burners in Shropshire – a group set up last year by Mr Kawczynski, said he was concerned by the figures.
He said: “You will see that, if the incinerator goes ahead, the council will be paying Veolia £10.79 million each year purely to burn 90,000 of municipal waste, which is just under £120 per tonne, and this cost will be increased by indexation.
“The council only gets a £12 per tonne rebate if it does not supply that amount of waste.”
Andy Goldsmith, assistant director for Public Protection with Shropshire Council, said: “Veolia have now submitted their planning application for an Energy from Waste facility in Shrewsbury.
“The planning application will be considered by Shropshire Council’s planning committee at the earliest opportunity.
“The committee has a completely independent role and will determine the application on its merits.”
Donald Macphail, managing director for Veolia Shro-pshire, said: “We believe the integrated contract provid-ed by Veolia offers value for money for the management of Shropshire’s waste.”
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120 pound a tonne is a RIP off, its far better to collect more types of reycling , this material far from being a cost can be sold for income
aluminium for instance is worth over 1000£ a tonne
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the people who signed this deal should be held to account for their lack of financial prudence
the simplest way to avoid this cost which will lead to rising council tax is to turn down the planning permission for this based on pollution and aesthetic objections
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but have they factored in the rising cost of landfill surely thats more expensive isnt it?
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Yet more reason for encouraging the Zero Waste experiment planned for the county but so strongly opposed publicly in the local press by tory councillors in Shrewsbury. The MP should should be getting his own party’s councillors to back him because it is they who will be voting at the planning meeting.
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oh what a suprise, the public sector ran a low cost vaguely profitable if slightly innefficient business, then they sold it off to the private sector, some french private equity firm snaps it up runs it into the ground, takes the profit and leaves us local british people with out a service, just like shrewsburys waste collection service, the sale of British Gas and such its all happened on a Tory Watch, Maggie started it and now Conservative controlled Shropshrie council has carried on this legacy with the folly of a PFI funded privatisation of waste services in the area, its a scam to transfer resources from the many to the few, from poor to rich and its all because of conservative ideology of selfish greed, no suprise this burner is in a former council estate, no conservative voters there, so let them suffer
We the tax payers will bail out the profit making firm when this goes wrong and the pollution levels are deemed too high, we the tax payers pay through the nose for years to come, its just not right
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thats a disgrace, what a rip off, its all because of PFI, its like buying it on a credit card, so you pay for the service and the loan too, its a crazy scheme which is proven to be more expensive than normal bank borrowing. Look at my calculations below you can see that in 2013 they will spend £12,000,000 on it, that figure is scary enough but the cost will snowball with inflation, like all these contracts, and its a 27 year contract, so even at only 2.5% annual inflation that means Shropshire’s council tax payers will pay over £400 million pounds!!!!! 400 million just for disposal of your rubbish, if you sum up all the adds ons as well it will be nearer half a billion pounds! Plus the risk that this will lead to legal cases from pollution and fines and such. Rememeber thats just on disposing of the black bins, they get paid to collect them too remember and they get paid to do recycling and numerous other services too. Look at the figures
2012 £12,000,000.00
2013 £12,300,000.00
2014 £12,607,500.00
2015 £12,922,687.50
2016 £13,245,754.69
2017 £13,576,898.55
2018 £13,916,321.02
2019 £14,264,229.04
2020 £14,620,834.77
2021 £14,986,355.64
2022 £15,361,014.53
2023 £15,745,039.89
2024 £16,138,665.89
2025 £16,542,132.54
2026 £16,955,685.85
2027 £17,379,578.00
2028 £17,814,067.45
2029 £18,259,419.13
2030 £18,715,904.61
2031 £19,183,802.23
2032 £19,663,397.28
2033 £20,154,982.22
2034 £20,658,856.77
2035 £21,175,328.19
2036 £21,704,711.39
Total £409,893,167.19
who ever signed up to this contract to spend a billion pounds of our money on waste, should be given a brief lesson in economics and then taken out into the woods and shot
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what a ridiculous place to put incinerator at battlefield. this will blight harlescott, hadnall, yorton,clive, harmer hill etc for years. no burner should even be considered without an adequate rail link
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Clearly the sums are damning, this must not be allowed to go ahead now, aslo this is just the financial costs, what about the environmental and social costs, there would hundreds more jobs sorting the waste instead, also the value of all those resources, tonnes of aluminium, scrap, food, wood etc which is a valuable commodity that can be made into useful recycled products and compost, to burn it is criminal and frankly stupid
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May,
Landfill will only reach £72 per tonne by 2013, and it will probably continue to rise by £8 per year, so it will take until 2028 to get to £120 per tonne, but remember that our Council’s payments to Veolia will rise by at least RPI each year, so it seems that the incinerator’s costs will always be higher than landfill. And, remember that our Council only gets a £12 per tonne rebate if it does not provide Veolia with the waste for burning, so it gets progressively more expensive per tonne the less the Council burns. (I don’t advocate landfill as an alternative, however, as there are other, better ways of reducing our waste). Have a look at your Council Tax Bill, which you should have received by now; our council says it has made savings of £10.8 million year on year, which is, strangely enough, exactly the amount it will pay Veolia for incineration, if the incinerator gets planning permission.
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thats big money
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what a load of rubbish
most councils are building incinerators now not just shropshrie, because its cheaper than landfill what those figures dont show is that it generates about a million pounds a year worth of electricity, so take that away and overall it is cheaper than landfill
(assuming the council was smart enough to write a contract whereby they kept the income from the electric)
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how can destroying resources by burning ever be economically or environmentally justified
this is such a waste of good resources
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we are against this, even in wem the pollutants will reach here and its so ugly and modern not right for a medieval town, its not right and i dont care about the money, its about the environment regardless of cost
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