Shropshire Star

Protest over recycling facility near mid Wales village

A protest march is set to take place in a Mid Wales village as residents rally to stop an authority building a large recycling facility.

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Abermule

Earlier this year Powys County Council received planning permission to build a recycling bulking plant on a small business park in Abermule, near Newtown.

The application has left residents angered, and they have objected to the application from start to finish.

Now they are holding a protest march against the plans. On Sunday evening over 200 residents packed into the village community centre for a protest meeting with people discussing why their small village had been singled out for an 'industrial scale development'.

The meeting lasted for over two hours and ended with a committee being formed to take forward a protest to the council and the Welsh Assembly.

The group, Abermule Communities Together, believe that the vacant business park plot is the wrong site for this activity with more suitable sites available on the industrial estates in Welshpool and Newtown.

Chair Jeff Mathews said at the meeting: "People power will get this turned over, an industrial process should be on an industrial estate, not in a rural village close to housing."

Now a protest march will take place from the community centre on Saturday, starting from 11am to the proposed site.

It comes after last month, Martin Aymes, who chairs the Cefn-y-Coed Community Group revealed there was a serious problem with the planning permission granted for the new facility on Abermule Business Park.

He wrote to the Secretary of State for Wales Lesley Griffiths in an effort to get the application called in.

He said an Environmental Impact Assessment should have been carried out as part of the application due to the size of the development, and that an error from Powys County Council planners means they mistakenly thought the assessment was not required.