Waste Company Errors Undermine Case For Incinerator

This is the latest from PAIN (People Against Incineration) fighting plans of Nottinghamshire County Council/Veolia for a County Incinerator in Sherwood Forest at Rainworth near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire:

Veolia got their sums wrong

Serious mathematical errors have embarrassed Veolia, undermining their application for a waste incinerator. When these mistakes are corrected, Veolia's own Carbon Analysis report, produced by Veolia's consultants RPS, shows that incineration is about the worst of a range of options in terms of climate change, and not the best as Veolia claimed.

Climate change is described as an "overriding material planning consideration" ever since the Government issued Planning Policy Statement 1 (Supplement) in December 2007. Veolia's original application failed to address the climate change impacts of their proposals, so in May 2008 Nottinghamshire County Council planners wrote to Veolia asking for them to assess carbon balance of incineration compared with other waste management options.

In an independent report commissioned by the local campaign group People Against Incineration (PAIN), Public Interest Consultant Alan Watson writes: [Veolia's analysis] "...contains some basic errors that are so serious that it cannot be relied upon to support the applicant's case...When Table 4 is checked on a spreadsheet it can be seen that whilst the results for the incinerator are correct, ALL the comparative MBT [an alternative to incineration] results include serious errors". When all of the errors have been corrected the report shows that "Over a 25-year period...the additional climate change damage caused by the incinerator would therefore be more than £57 million".

Shlomo Dowen, of PAIN's Legal & Research Team, says: "This is just what PAIN needed to accompany our latest 150 pages of planning objections. We expect the climate change report to be an important document for submission to the forthcoming Public Inquiry into the controversial Sherwood Forest (Rainworth) incinerator proposals".

PAIN calls upon Veolia and Nottinghamshire county council to withdraw their application and engage with the community to develop mutually acceptable sustainable waste management solutions that place greater emphasis on reducing, reusing and recycling discarded material.