A consultation has been launched by Essex County Council on a waste development document to replace the 1999 Essex & Southend Waste Plan, which should have been updated in 2005. This is a legal formality to comply with Government planning regulations.

Please make a response and support what we must do with our valuable resources for the next 20 years.

The county council and district councils face huge public spending cuts. There has never been a worse time for committing Essex taxpayers to hugely costly and totally unnecessary polluting waste disposal plants for 28.5-year contracts.

They will increase climate change gases and waste massive amounts of energy by destroying valuable materials for ever. We must reduce, re-use, recycle and compost all our waste over the next decade.

Last year, Essex recycled and composted 46 per cent – up eight per cent in two years – and landfilled less than 350,000 tonnes.

Our total municipal waste has dropped from 700,000 tonnes five years ago to 650,000 tonnes last year, in spite of the extra housing.

Essex County Council has already rubber-stamped its plans for massive mechanical biological treatment plants to shred and dry our valuable resources for 30 years to make fuel to burn in polluting incinerators.

The council’s Conservatives have ignored huge opposition to mechanical biological treatment plants and incineration in previous consultations and their own pledges against incineration since 2001.

The council got the widely-discredited Private Finance Initiative Government finance for its waste disposal plants in the final round of bids last autumn and put 28.5-year, hugely costly waste disposal contracts out to tender.

It was reported recently that preferred bidders are down to four, including Cory. These must be stopped before any more time and money is wasted.

Cory has permission from Essex County Council for a massive mechanical biological treatment plant at Stanway to shred 250,000 tonnes per year of our valuable resources and dump it in landfill for 25 years. The council has approved plants at Basildon and Rivenhall Airfield.

The council’s incinerator plans have been held up by strong public opposition for 14 years and they are years behind most other authorities, some of whom are dropping the widely discredited, costly private finance initiative loans.

Some are trying to dump incinerator contracts for incinerators which will divert materials from recycling and composting and will literally cost the earth.

Please tell Essex County Council we do not need any of these major sites for massive, polluting and costly waste disposal plants. We do not require huge central sites.

Please respond, if you can. Call 0845 603 7624 for a form, or visit essex.gov.uk/WDD.

Just put down your key priorities. There is a prebookable afternoon workshop at Colchester on November 1.

Paula Whitney
Co-ordinator
Colchester & North East Essex
Friends of the Earth
Shears Crescent
West Mersea