Press Release
For Immediate release: 06.07.09
INCINERATOR TO BURN RADIOACTIVE AND HAZARDOUS WASTE.
Can we trust the council now that this has been revealed?
Croydon Greens have obtained a damning document [1] which confirms their worst fears and exposes the intention of the South London Waste Partnership. The key to the document are the numbers and codes it contains.
Firstly, it identifies the estimated cost: 919, 000, 000.00 GBP. Almost £1billion (see page 6 of document).
Secondly it suggests that total residual waste will reduce from 222,000 tonnes in 2014 to 200,000 tonnes in 2023 (page 5). This means recycling targets will barely improve whilst the ‘waste management site’ is in operation. The local Green Party have been explaining to local residents that a steady flow of waste would be required to make the privately run plant profitable. This will no doubt include recyclable waste.
Most importantly, the document contains a series of codes known in EU-speak as the Common Procurement Vocabulary (page 5).
One can simply enter the object code listed in the table (page 5) into the ‘find’ field of the EU glossary[2]. Using this process one is able ascertain what each code means.
Here are some examples of what Croydon Council is asking bids for:
9051330= Incineration
9051390=Sludge disposal
90520000=Radioactive, toxic, medical and hazardous waste services ( you can guess why they wanted that in code)
90524200=Clinical waste disposal
45252300=Refuse incinerator construction
Spokesperson for the Croydon Green Party Shasha Khan said:
“All along the Croydon Green Party has been maintaining that the incinerator will suddenly appear on the horizon, most plausibly, in the Beddington sewage works area. The vast majority of people in the borough are unaware that a consultation has even started.
“Now we have obtained the procurement contract. This document contains a series of codes which can only be interpreted through the ‘Common Procurement Vocabulary’ – a sort pan European glossary. Thankfully we’ve identified what the numbers on the procurement contract actually mean.
“Quite how we have moved from an innocent consultation leaflet entitled ‘Moving away from landfill’, with fields of daisies and woodland on the front cover, to document that sees Croydon Council asking for bids for: incineration, sludge disposal, radioactive, toxic, medical and hazardous waste services, clinical waste disposal and refuse incinerator construction is beyond me. I don’t recall this being agreed.
“Not only that, the billion pound procurement contract suggests that hazardous waste from other areas will be transported in via trucks for us to dispose.
Shasha continued:
“I must take this opportunity to reiterate the solution to our growing waste crisis is a zero waste strategy of ‘reducing and reusing coupled with recycling and composting. At the cost of a billion pounds, surely this money could be better spent on an extensive education programme, comprehensive kerbside recycling facility and the building of Resource Recovery Plant.
“But it’s the health effects that most concern me. Studies show cancer rates, birth defects, lung and kidney disease all go up. [3]”
Recently Croydon Council accused the Croydon Green Party of “going around frightening people about incinerators” – in other words scaremongering. Conservative Cllr Phil Thomas also said that ”the South London Waste Partnership will not have any of the things that we call incinerators”
Commenting on the accusations Shasha Khan said:
“I think it is fair to ask the Tory council for apology because this procurement contract shows that Croydon is calling for bids on incineration and refuse incinerator construction.
Ends
Notes:
[1] http://www.croydon.gov.uk/contents/departments/business/pdf/Ltwaste
[2] The numbers listed in the Common Procurement Vocabulary
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2008:074:0001:0375:EN:PDF
[3] http://www.ecomed.org.uk/content/IncineratorReport_v3.pdf
[4] http://noincineratorforcroydon.blogspot.com/2009/05/croydon-advertiser-publicises-issue.html
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Tags croydon, greenparty
4 comments:
Hmmm...not sure about this. Dealing with radioactive waste is a government only thing isn't it? I looked at the long list of codes that could have been used and my guess is that they have had to use this one because they do need to deal with some hazardous waste (like old tins of paint for instance). But there is no single code for that, so they have had to use the one they did. It seems to me hugely inflamatory to intimate that what this means is that the proposals are about treating spent plutonium rods. What a nonsense! At least that's my reading of it. Agree that a field of daisies is a bit of an odd thing. It would have been better maybe if they had shown the sea of trash that gets dumped in big holes on other people's doorsteps after tonnes of rubbish have been lugged around the country for miles in polluting trucks...
Medical ( X Ray) and industrial uses for radioactive elements abound,and the waste needs disposing...currently at only two sites in the London area,Viridor Lakeside (old Grundon Colnbrook) and White Rose Sidcup.Both have strong associations with excess infant mortality in the downwind wards.While this is not the place to discuss the problems of alpha-particle emitting dusts and their carcinogenicity,it is important that people really do get informed about the whole area the government so love calling "Low level radioactive waste".Perhaps interested readers might like to google the Guardian obituary of Professor Rotblatt,the Nobel laureate.
Zero waste efforts can be successful. The Pepsi Bottling Group and OAKLEAF worked together to recycle and divert waste at selected sites in the U.S. They reduced the amount of waste going to the landfill by as much 68% in a very short amount of time.
See how they did this at 7/23 Webinar from OAKLEAF Zero Waste…One Solution http://bit.ly/KcBWC
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