Herts Waste Consultation deadline this Friday!

12.00.00am GMT Sun 13th Dec 2009

HertsWOW

PPC Nigel Quinton has issued the following call to everyone to help reject the county council's proposed waste strategy, that will see £220 million pounds spent on an incinerator and hundreds of millions of pounds of our money committed to feeding this monster for the next quarter of a century.

The consultation on Hertfordshire's Waste Strategy closes on the 18th December. The on-line consultation is hard to find, and challenging to complete. Suffice to say that to date it appears just six members of the public have managed to post comments on-line.

However, responses can be made in a number of ways:

• electronically using the Limehouse on-line consultation portal; (if you have a few hours to spare)

• using the on-line response form on www.hertsdirect.org.uk; (look for the page "Waste planning")

• by post using the response form; or via email to cdu@hertscc.gov.uk.

The most straightforward method is to email or use the response form and to simply make these points:

1. Energy from waste does not necessarily mean incineration, and many local authorities in the UK have already found better ways than this.

2. The information in the 'strategy' that dismisses other alternatives is outdated and misleading.

3. The 'strategy' makes little effort to target waste reduction, and assumes that we will be as profligate with our waste in 30 years time as we are now.

4. Much more can and should be done to reduce the "irreducible" waste - using MBT, Anaerobic Digestion and in-vessel composting on smaller, more local sites, none of which are discussed in any meaningful way in the council documents.

5. Lastly, but crucially, the site the council are proposing at New Barnfield, next to houses and a special needs school, is quite blatantly inappropriate.

In essence, if ever there was a time to rip it up and start again, this is it.