Binklow and Coventry Incinerator Ash

Keith Kondakor, from Nuneaton Friends of the Earth, was on BBC Coventry this morning about plans to recycle the bottom ash taken from the Coventry incinerator. A plant to process the bottom ash is proposed for 1 mile southwest of Brinklow.

The link to the planning application is here.

Keith's the expert on things like this, but from what I've read from him, the ash comes out of the incinerator very wet (cooled by water). It will be dried out in Brinklow in towering 8 metre tall piles. If we had better recycling, a zero waste policy like many councils in New Zealand, we'd reduce the glass, aluminium and steel that make up half of the ash. The ash, whilst less deadly than from the incinerator's pollution control filters, contains heavy metals and some dioxins. In such huge piles, it's liable to blow away in the wind, towards Brinklow. At the very least, as Keith was saying on BBC Coventry, the piles should be only a few metres tall, to prevent the ash blowing every which way.

It's a good example of how the idea of "let's incinerate as much as we can" looks dangerously simplistic.