MP Daniel Kawczynski will lie in road to stop Shrewsbury incinerator
Tuesday 24th January 2012, 4:59PM GMT.
MP Daniel Kawczynski today vowed to lie in the middle of road to stop construction work starting on Shrewsbury’s £60 million incinerator.
Mr Kawczynski, MP for Shrewsbury, made the defiant claim despite admitting he knew his efforts to make a stand and delay work could see the police called to intervene.
He said he was angry that Government planning inspector John Woolcock this month gave waste contractor Veolia permission to build the burner, which will burn waste from across the county, at Battlefield on the outskirts of the town.
The Tory urged people to let him know when work on the waste facility appeared to be starting so he could lie flat across the road forming an obstruction to the site.
The politician said a meeting was being set up this week between him and the NOBIS (No Burners in Shropshire) group so he could brief them on how his recent emergency meeting with Veolia chief executive Robert Hunt went, and to decide how they would now oppose the development.
He said: “I also still intend to use parliamentary privilege powers in Parliament to say exactly what I think of Veolia and the current state of the planning process.
“The planned site for the incinerator is very close to my constituency office.
“I urge residents to keep their eyes peeled because they will probably try and start the work when no-one is expecting and I intend to lie down on the road to stop the first construction lorry get onto site.”
He has also written to Commons speaker John Bercow to apply for a debate on the power of the planning inspectorate over local authority decision making.
Veolia, which is responsible for waste management on behalf of Shropshire Council, claims the burner will be able to generate enough energy to power 10,000 homes.
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You have to admire Daniel , most tory mp,s would object in the strongest of terms by letter but Daniel and the Telford tory just get in there say what they think and do what they think .
Just think if we still had labour , libdem, cant make up my mind marsden he would probably be composing a poem .
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I don’t admire him .he should intervened earlier.
Was there when people were waving their placards?He’s only bothered because it’s next door to his office.
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A sleeping politician? Sums up another waste of futile energy.
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i take it all back, well done dk, mp. let us block the road and really get the protest band wagon rolling
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Please, please, please.
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OMG Dont make me laugh , so he dos not know more than us ????
The Tory urged people to let him know when work on the waste facility appeared to be starting so he could lie flat across the road forming an obstruction to the site.
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No doubts Mr Kawczynski condems all other peoples who take up this sort of “peaceful” demonstrations elsewhere in the Country because it does not fit in with his “ambitions”
Let him Lie in the Road, let him obstruct the highway, let the Police arrest him, lets hear his Glorious leader “just call me Dave” back him.
Just another bandwagon to jump on, where was he when 1000′s of his local Constituent’s many of whom voted for him when they were pressured into accepting a 5% paycut or be sacked, did he join then in any demonstrations, did he lay his sweet backside down for them?
The mans a fake.
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Couldnt have put it better myself!
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So you lot admit you voted the tories in then , mugs.
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You call them mugs?
I voted Lib Dem!!
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Same thing… as we are now finding to our cost!
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Fair play to you Pete not many people willing to admit to it the sad thing about the whole situation is it was his party when in power of the old scc that signed the agreements and for what i have heard it has more holes in it then a tea bag.
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And at the next election Mr K will and has lost my vote along with several hundred more, he was not there when we needed him.
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Can he get more of his cronies from the commons and lords to help him? It may reduce the massive expense claims that we pay them.
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I’ve never been his biggest fan but fairplay to him if he actually goes through with this. He’s going to need some support though..
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I’ve never liked, or trusted the man, and this latest piece of, “look at me, I’m a man of the people”, posturing merely reinforces my opinion of him.
A totally pointless exercise as far as protesting goes, as for PR, about 2/10.
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thats one for the no support box then.
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I think most of Shrewsbury will join him, why are they building something that everyone living here disagrees with?
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“everyone living here disagrees with” – not everyone mate not everyone
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I’m for the incinerator, I suppose the next comment will insist that we are cranks.
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Indeed not all, some of us have move up into the 21st century.
Build it asap.
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You’ll not be living under the shadow of it then probably Andy!
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Nobody lives ‘under the shadow’ of it, it is in an industrial area or have you not studied the plans? The prevailing westerly winds will push the minimal residue over open country, there are no major housing areas downwind.
Stop being a drama queen.
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Ok everyone who lives in the area it’s being built in disagrees. Those it will effect. It’s easy to say ‘get it bulit’, if you don’t live near it.
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Like most Britons, I want a referendum on our country’s EU membership.
Daniel Kawczynski recent backed Cameron’s decision to deny us a referendum – I wonder what he’d say if a few dozen pro referendum campaigners decide to lie down outside his office in protest.
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You have to remember that MPs are like weathercocks, they’ll turn to which way the wind blows at any particular time
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I was going to say the same thing, but not mention the weather.
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This rent-a-quote MP of ours will, it seems, do anything for a bit of publicity. This man is a phoney. Let him lie in the road by all means. Such futile acts suit well.
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Do you feel that borrowing £60m in PFI funding to build an unwanted burner represents a good deal for taxpayers and their children for the next few decades?
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We produce millions of tons of rubbish. We can’t keep burying it in the ground in the same way that the antis bury their heads. We might as well burn it, produce some power. And I understand that local democracy has voted on this.
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If we are looking at the best deal for taxpayers surely we should be working with the grain of public opinion, rather than against it and pursuing zero-waste targets like in Wales.
Would you not agree that massively expanding recycling would be cheaper and create more long-term jobs locally than building a £60m incinerator using PFI funds, which we and our children will have to repay more and more on as our credit rating sinks?
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I’ll believe it when I see it!
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This man is not fit to be our M P. This is a democracy Mr Kawczynski and you lost this vote.
It’s time the local Conservative party got rid of him. He seems to have his finger in every pie regarding lost causes.
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I think you will find Mr k won the vote hands down best MP we have had in decades if ever.
J Holt asked one question while in the house that was in 76 when he asked for the windows to be opened.
Conway well less said about him the better, cant make my mind up marsden a disgrace.
Mr K has shown he represents ALL his cinstituants no matter what party they support. That is what makes a good MP and Councillor once elected they assist ALL voters who are their constituents , this is probably why the odd voter gets a little hot under the collar and accuses him of jumping on all band wagons , in fact more MP’S and councilors should adopt this attitude.
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Andrew Finch said.
“Mr K has shown he represents ALL his constituants no matter what party they support.”
He does? then tell me Andrew where was he when 1000′s of council workers were “forced” to take a pay cut or be sacked, was he on the demonstrations, did he lay on the road on behalf of his constituants?
Did he even raise his voice, did he get a mention in this paper?
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Well ron we have to make some tough choices in the current climate , labour said they would now do the same.
Funny old world though, i was at shirehall yesterday talking to a guy and he said nobody there had voted Tory , MMMMMMMMMMM me thinks he was telling porkies most have got what they voted for a tory party in charge.
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and you can bet your bottom dollar had Labour been in charge and done the same as the Ruling Tory council then DANNY boy would have been behind the shirehall workers and become a man of the people.
He is a bandwagon jumper when it suits.
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Which vote, driver?
EVERY Shrewsbury and Atcham candidate at the last general election was opposed to the incinerator.
Could you tell us which candidate was FOR it?
In February 2011 in West Norfolk, there was a vote on a proposed incinerator in King’s Lynn.
In that referendum over 92% of the 70,763 people who voted were opposed to it.
This is a clear example of how unpopular incinerators are, I think.
Standing up for democracy has never been a ‘lost cause’ or ‘futile’, no matter how much energy by PR firms and lobbyists is put into that increasingly redundant ‘meme’.
It unites people across the political divide and exposes and isolates those who prefer to serve corporations rather than voters.
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Arthur Dent tried a similar stunt once IIRC ;-)
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He did!
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Where do the people of Shrewsbury think the waste that they create goes to??
More Nimbyism, a case of anywhere but my backyard mate.
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We don’t produce enough waste to need it, so we’ll be burning everyone else’s too. I don’t want this in Telford, Shrewsbury or any where near homes.
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There was a tall MP called Dan
The new incinerator he wanted to ban
He said he would lay in the road
Until Veolia he had showed
What a good speed bump he made as a man
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We’ve got the UK’s tallest MP- looks like we’re also about to have the UK’s longest sleeping policeman!
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There is a fine lady called eva,
Whose love of this burner won’t leave her.
‘I don’t work for them’,
Says she again and again.
The thing is, we don’t all believe her.
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Whatever he thinks of the incinerator it has been approved in law. He is proposing to unlawfully obstruct the road stopping people going to work and diverting the police to deal with his futile grandstanding. It is not an example that an MP should be setting and I hope that the speaker in the House of Commons advises him that he should not abuse his position
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Everyone has the right to peaceful protest.We live in the UK not Iran.
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Yep everyone has a right to peaceful protest but he is proposing to break the law not the example an MP should set. If he was clever enough he would come up with something that was lawful and effective and not designed to get himself on the telly at the expense of those trying to get to work or the police having to deal with his immature antics. As an MP he should obey the law, accept that sometimes you don’t get your own way and start thinking a little more intelligently
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Unless you want to protest at Chineese intervention in Tibet, at which point the Government and police arrange to prevent peaceful protest.
Unless you want to protest against arms manufacturers at which point the government and the police prevent peaceful protest
Unless you want to protest against greed in the city, at which point the government and the police prevent peaceful protest
Unless you want to protest against government involvement in war in Iraq, at which point legislation is passed clearing a peaceful protest from parliament square.
Need I continue? Or do you still assert that everyone has the right to peaceful protest?
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Good on you Dan, he is only saying what the majority of people feel, public money should not be spend on this, its out of character with the historic setting
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Its an industrial area last time i looked.
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Wrong ron, go look again it has a 15th century church, burial grounds, agricutlural land a listed building a farm shop and a battlefield site of national importance
read your history books, go look again and check your facts before you comment next time, you are wrong wrong wrong this land is precious and even the inspector agreed it would harm an important historic site
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Not forgetting STADCO and the Abattoir..
you can’t deny that these are factories of huge historical importance.
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Bex Tell us how it will “harm” this historical site, last time i looked the “battlefield” was just that a field that according to some historians could well be elsewhere nearby.
Also its a fair way to the Church from the actual site.. it’ll be closer to Twisting my mellons sites, in Stadco and the Abattoir and all those othe olde world buildings on Harlscott business centre and Battlefiled industral estate.
You and others are just plain NIMBYS. :)
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Incinerators tend to be sited in less affluent parts of town, ron.
Should our MP ignore the genuine health concerns of people living close to the site?
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We can’t afford it, we don’t want it, why is it being built?
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This ‘industrial area’is about a mile from Heath Farm Estate and Mount Pleasant, the largest housing areas on north side of town. How can government planning officers overule locally made decisions is there no form of appeal?
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Me a fine lady, gosh thanks Huw!
Did you compose that on your composting loo?
Around Veolia I do not lurk,
Though waste management is part of my work
Caring for the old and the environment too!
Perhaps it is time you should ask
for those we vote for to be put to task?
I don’t wish to preach
As you are such a Peach
whilst on the moral high ground you like to bask!
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Sorry to revert to prose, eva, though I did enjoy your poem, but…
Do I think challenging corporate PR the ‘moral’ thing to do?
Yes, I probably do.
But surely -more importantly- it’s just intellectual self-defence.
The more of us who start standing up to it, the clearer the air will be for local democracy to function.
By the way, do you think releasing £60m in PFI loans for an unwanted burner is a good way to spend scarce resources?
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What would you spend it on Hugh?
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A sustainable, affordable waste system, which supported rather than undermined the green aspirations of Shropshire people.
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well im with the mp on this, its a disgusting imposition on our community which will make people ill with respiratory problems from unmonitored micro particles of dust and ash and heavy metals and lower house prices more
it should not be allowed, it would never be backed in a posher area of town, and i will support the mp on this too
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I’d never vote Tory and I don’t agree with Daniel Kawczynski on much but I do agree on this. He is right to stand up for local people when their local council won’t listen. We pay for this so called service yet its all about profit for some foreign firm. It’s a disgrace what we get for nearly £2,000 a year. The waste service in Shropshire is a shambles. Bring back the old district councils with a decent refuse service I say. It is not acceptable in an era of austerity to pay over the odds and continue the failed PFI model whilst schools are being shut this is not a priority.
If they invested just 10% of this in a decent recycling collection service the whole project would be completely redundant anyway.
We are heading into a depression. We should be trying to get value of out waste not pay for it to be destroyed.
Lets spend money on job creation in labour intensive collection and sorting services not over priced boys toys and shiny kit funded by debt which will destroy resources, destroy the environment, destroy wealth and destroy jobs.
Ashes to ashes dust to dust, incinerators are a luxury we can afford, recycling and jobs are a MUST
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Oh gosh Daniel you are so daring, obviously with the Tory popularity waning you feel you need to hop aboard the merry bandwagon and get your smug face in the media to boost the polls, like a previous message says just because your office is a stones throw away.
You don’t want to subject your little beavers who beaverishly work for you to the levels of pollution that all the surrounding residents will suffer do you!!
Heaven forbid that when you have to come back from your plush Westminster pad you have to wear breathing apparatus to your office, we couldn,t be having Shrewsburys nearest thing to royalty doing that could we Daniel!!!!!!
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waning behave yourself.
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Mr Finch, if you have not anything better to do then go and lie with him, human sleeping policemen!!
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Naaa don’t think they need my help.
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Perhaps MP DK can put off lying in the road for the moment and sort out Shropshire’s underperforming schools,youth unemployment problems and declining economy. Please.
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Stop being so pompous Huw. Cutting and pasting vast tracts from websites and repeating mantras just makes people switch off.
Praising Councillors when as other posters have shown here, they voted the deal with Veolia in the first place reveals the complexity of this subject and that the ultimate winners who can pay for their childrens education and future are those who get paid for the planning process, by us taxpayers.
Councillors, council officers,administrators, planning consultants, lawyers you name it. Whether we actually get the decisions we want is out of our hands because we pay lay people to swing deals then when they are a bit unpopular, claim it was nothing to do with them.
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Thanks for the advice, eva.
The reason I have to repeat myself is because you have never answered the question about PFI funding for the burner.
Surely if you decry the funds that local taxpayers have been forced to spend funding Veolia’s appeal, you must feel more than a little ambivalent about the millions that taxpayers will spend funding Veolia’s unpopular incinerator.
Whether we actually get the decisions we want is NOT out of our hands if politicians wake up to public opinion, think again and start pressuring contractors to do the job that the public want them to do.
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You use the terms ‘we’ and ‘our’ Huw, like you represent everyone. I think you are confused for another reason, contractors, surprisingly, work to a contract. A contract is not a democratic entity but a legal one, with legal consequences. All the moralising in the world will not change that.
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27-year contracts involving a controversial decision to ignore the local waste plan’s stance on incineration ought to have been discussed openly beforehand so that the councillors who signed it could have confidently used the terms ‘we’ and ‘our’ like they represented everyone.
But it wasn’t and we are not even allowed to see the contract.
However, as with Stephen Hester’s contract, democratic pressure (or as you call it ‘moralising’) can have an effect on councillors and contractors if they find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion.
And if the local MP is willing to take up the fight and show that local democracy is worth fighting for, so much the better as he can justifiably say that he does have a democratic mandate to represent everyone.
Would you recommend that people disgusted by this decision just quietly accept Veolia’s arguments that it’s impossible to collect cardboard and abandon all of our recycling habits because we know Veolia just want to keep their furnaces going?
Surely it would be better to exert democratic pressure on our contractors as has happened with the RBS bank bonus.
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would prefer the money spent on an automated recycling centre instead please, would be miles cheaper, better for the environment and still reduce the volume of landfill
surely they should be looking at that as a more cost effective option?
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Dont get peolpe in this town, Why dont we stick together in the hundreds or even thousands and block the roads with the local MP to stop the burner being built, They cant arrest us all.The burner is a waste of money, Hazardous to our healths and our pockets.
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So what is the real answer to getting rid of all the rubbish? The council site says we send it to a Telford landfill but it does not say how long this has been going on. As we are not dealing with our own rubbish within our own county area then what are we going to do with it? That we are already foisting it on other people definately doesn’t seem fair to me and one day the Telford tip will be full. Anyone?
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San Francisco is aiming for zero-waste and aspires to avoid landfill and incineration. I think we need to have the same aspirations here and massively increase recycling, Jen. It’s cheaper, more energy-efficient and would create more jobs.
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I just hope he forewarns us when he’s going to do this. I don’t want my journey held up.
Perhaps Radio Shopshire could give out warnings on the day in their traffic bulletins?
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Has anyone else Huw?
No. Point made.
Have you considered that the reasons that the county councillors first supported this (apart from the wining and dining!) is it because Veolia have probably agreed some of the profits will be fed back to Shropshire Council,and the proposal to heat thousands of homes was probably taken into account too.
Nobody wants to deal with the less savoury aspects of the way we live but when you look at the massively growing elderly population, for example, do you ever consider the enormous amount of nappy/pad type products used? They can’t be recycled. I remember all the bile that was raised at mothers using tons of disposable nappies.
A bit reminescent of the anger at them clogging up the roads taking their now, hopefully out of nappies offspring, to school and creating traffic jams for all the other far more important people!
The problem with recycling is how can you make people do it and make them do it properly.
If the cardboard recycling had been done properly there would not be the fear/liklihood of contaminated compost for growing our food in.
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I must say that this incinerator sounds like a good idea, but why doesn’t everyone have their own cast iron stove at home, removing the environment burden of infrastructure?
Thats what I do, burn everything. I regularly collect ‘waste’ from friends. I will break appliances into their separate metals to recycle, reuse bits, burn wood and take hard plastic to recycling.
I’m all for being envirnmentally kind, but these greenies don’t want to sort their own waste – they expect someone else to do it in an utopian fashion at no expense.
The problem is we are all TOO wealthy and create too much waste.
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A lack of response to my PFI-debt question suggests to you that people don’t need to substantiate their arguments and that inconvenient points can simply be ignored.
To me it suggests that people cannot deny that the PFI-debt repayments incurred to the taxpayer have massively increased since the financial crisis began.
It also suggests that they cannot deny the costs of this debt for the next generation.
None of us will ever know whether -as you suggest- ‘profits will be fed back to Shropshire Council’ because the details of PFI contracts are kept secret from the people who have to pay for them.
Are you privy to this information?
Your suggestion is plausible but how will any of us ever find this out, when PFI contracts are excluded from Freedom of Information requests?
I agree that disposable nappies are a very difficult ecological problem, and washable nappies are not always an option for busy families. I also accept your point that old people’s homes need to deal with massive volumes of nappies, too.
However, in the same way that cycling schemes and walk-to-school policies have had a positive effect on the school run, surely government can support existing washable nappy schemes and our highly creative entrepreneurs can invent, at the design stage, better nappies, which can be composted or recycled.
Why do we have to burn them at great cost to the public purse, eva?
You asked how we can encourage people to recycle and to ‘do it properly’.
Education.
It can be slow, but generally people understand the need to recycle, and the massive increases in recycling locally in the last few years have been amazing ( http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2010/11/01/shropshire-achieves-household-recycling-record/ ), and have shown that Shropshire people genuinely want to do their bit.
You said Shropshire has stopped composting cardboard because Shropshire people are not doing it ‘properly’.
This is an insult to local people, who came out in force to support the Cardboard Christmas recycling scheme, and to those who found that they were forced to put their cardboard in the bin because their council + Veolia refused to collect it from the kerbside.
People around the country living under other authorities have barely noticed the changes to the composting regulations because kerbside collections of cardboard continue.
This is NOT because these people are doing it ‘properly’ and that Shropshire people can’t do it ‘properly’.
It’s simply because they have local authorities who are getting their contractors to do their job ‘properly’ and work with the green aspirations of the people they serve.
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Well said Eva
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Reading this is pathetic, it sounds like a bunch of yokels who can’t even spell, MOANING about something they do not have the intelligence to understand…at least he is doing something, rather than most of you which just sit there moaning, you are all so clever…so go on let your kids breathe carcinogenic fumes, let the house prices devalue in the surrounding area, let the taxpayer bail out this white elephant that will cost us all money through loss in the end, its totally not needed, and there are millions of better places to build it, but oh no lets put it right smack bang in the middle of a residential area that is already very high on the deprivation scale, harlescott ranks at approx 350 out of 4000 on the deprivation scale on the .gov statistics website, ranking lower for life quality than some inner city areas in big cities like liverpool or manchester. typical of shrewsbury council and the mentality of this NIMBY town, it would never even of got past the planning stage if it had been proposed in the middle class tory heartlands of bayston hill or copthorne ect……so annoying.
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Does the afore-said fame-seeking MP Kawczynski lie or lay in the road?
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So the majority of Shropshire people recycle properly and the contamination, a gardening friend of mine found in her compost was all in her imagination Huw?
I can assure you Huw, that burning nappies and pads is far less contaminating and risk free than landfill and anyway the Telford is almost full. Perhaps we should offer up the Dingle?
We used to reycle people in the ground.Now most us us are uncinerated and in a posh part of Shrewsbury too!
We didn’t used to use disposable pads or nappies and I think you hit the nail on the head there Huw. People are too busy. Well some of them if they are lucky enough to have a job and then those who do have the time to disinfect, soak and wash nappiesand pads I personally think are really very unlikely to, so you have an awful lot of folk to educate, don’t you?
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In 1998/99 we recycled only 7.8% of our waste in Shropshire.
In 2010 it was 52.6%.
What caused this massive increase in just 11 years?
Shropshire Council and its waste contractor made recycling a simple and convenient part of our culture, and an awful lot of Shropshire folk embraced the changes and got better at recycling each year.
If other authorities can continue to increase recycling rates, collect cardboard and push for zero-waste goals, then why can’t we do the same?
It’s not because the people in those authorities recycle ‘properly’ and don’t throw away nappies.
It’s because their local authorities are working with the grain of people’s green aspirations rather than against them.
Here in Shropshire the boot is on the other foot, and it seems that -whatever our local democracy thinks of the burner idea or about cardboard collections being stopped- householders are just going to have to do what Veolia tells them to and pay for the privilege.
Who do you think benefits most from our 27-year waste contract with Veolia? Shropshire taxpayers?
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