Surrey Councillor and Chair of South East Green Party Jonathan Essex is calling on the council to halt its incineration plans and invest in recycling instead.

The calls come ahead of a cabinet meeting at Surrey County Council next week (28 April), where councillors will decide whether or not to continue with plans to develop a new ‘Eco Park’ at Charlton Lane.

Charlton Lane Eco Park details

Waste management company SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT (formerly known as SITA UK) was first granted planning permission to develop an Eco Park at Charlton Lane, Shepperton, on behalf of Surrey County Council in March 2012.

The proposals include plans to build:

• a gasification facility with pre-treatment to process up to 55,000 tonnes of household waste per year;
• an anaerobic digestion (AD) facility to process 40,000 tonnes of food waste per year;
• a recyclables bulking facility; and
• a visitor and education centre.

However, In July 2013 the cabinet attached seven conditions to the contract that needed to be met before final approval could be given. These included: confirming an amendment to the environmental permit to reflect the replacement of the gasification technology provider (as the previous supplier, Ascot Environmental, ceased trading); diverting the public footpath to the north of the Eco Park; confirming that the final cost of the project ‘represents value for money, is the lowest cost option and is affordable within the council's medium term financial plan’; and confirming that the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) agrees to support the project through a PFI (private finance initiative) grant.

These conditions have now all been met (and despite increased costs due to the delays, the council maintains that the project is still ‘value for money’), and the cabinet will therefore be asked on Tuesday to ‘unconditionally approve’ the commitment to build the Eco Park.

A spokesman for Surrey County Council said that the park could “bring enormous benefits to Surrey, helping [it] to treat food and household waste in a more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly way, while generating enough green electricity from rubbish that can’t be recycled to power 8,000 homes".

He added: “It is essential that we invest in the infrastructure needed to reduce the amount of waste we send to landfill for the taxes we have to pay alone, and by reducing the volume of waste that is buried in the ground we will also reduce the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.”

‘Invest in good waste management’

However, several Surrey councillors, including the Chair of South East Green Party, Jonathan Essex, are calling for the council to scrap its Eco Park plans, arguing that the council (and central government) should be relying less on incineration and investing more in recycling and reuse technology.

Essex said: “There are 10 times more jobs per tonne of waste in reuse and recycling than incineration. Government policies, taken forward by the actions of Surrey County Council, are literally burning money and throwing jobs away.

“The best way to reduce our resource use is to create a sharing economy – reuse and recycling are not new ideas, and it can form part of a sharing economy, creating jobs that bring people together so that we can reduce, reuse and recycle our way to one-planet-living.

“Instead of letting recycling rates flatline and closing the UK’s last office-grade paper recycling plant, we should improve facilities so everyone can easily recycle more, including those living in flats.”

Writing on his blog, he added: ‘I think it is ludicrous [that] Surrey County Council will have to make further cuts across the council – because the government encourages it to build an incinerator which reduces by millions the money that is available to allocate to local councils, including Surrey….

‘The £85 and £160 million of public money saved from not building the Eco Park could be invested in good waste management: reducing, reusing and recycling even more of what we currently throw away… We could invest in building new recycling plants rather than building incinerators – to keep jobs in recycling plastics, and reverse the decline of UK paper recycling. This approach could create green jobs across the UK, a different way to rebuild our economy.’

Liberal Democrat Ian Beardsmore, a member of Surrey County Council's Planning and Regulatory Committee and Local Committee in Spelthorne, told Resource that the incinerator project had been going on for so long that it no longer offers 'value for money' as the "key financial driver for the Eco Park was ROC" (Renewables Obligations Certifications that provide grants for renewable energy), which will be scrapped in March 2016 (before this incinerator comes online).

He added that the project had been a 'shambles'.

Find out more about the Charlton Lane Eco Park or view an aerial video below on how the park will look