Coventry, PFI And A New Incinerator

If we're recycling 25% of our waste now, and burning 75% of it in the incinerator on London Road, it would be ideal to flip those two percentages. However, a long-term policy that favours incineration will lock Coventry into burning our waste for decades.

Coventry City Council is pursuing an "expression of interest" in PFI money for a new incinerator. This needs to be in by 30th March. One of the council's scrutiny boards has a hearing today on it. The full "outline business case" has to be in 6 months later and will cost a further £2m in consultant fees.

PFI is closing down, as far as waste goes, so despite the incinerator being due to be replaced in 2020/21, they're now rushing to meet this bid deadline of end of March.

Keith Kondakor (the Green Party up in Nuneaton; the FOE West Midlands spokesperson on waste) was on BBC Coventry yesterday, debating with Hazel Noonan, the city council cabinet member on incineration.

The Coventry Telegraph (page 5, yesterday) has an article on a FoE press release, and they're asking for people to contact them with their views, i.e. letters to the editor. The email would be letters@coventry-telegraph.co.uk

Instead of paying through the nose for consultant advice and planning to replace an incinerator with an incinerator, the council could be exploring alternatives.

Norwich, for example, is looking at a biomass energy plant: http://nail2.org/alte.html

You have parts of Flanders in Belgium recycling at 75-80%. How do they do it? You have entire countries (http://www.zerowaste.co.nz/) pursuing zero waste policies. How do they do it?

The council doesn't seem very curious.

The answer is that these places have made policy choices, for the long-term, choices oriented around educating people to reduce their waste.

We need to reduce the amount of waste produced, re-using, repairing and recycling materials, and environmentally-friendly treatment of residual waste to recover usable materials and compost organic matter.