Hold fire over £72m. incinerator, says deputy

THE island's waste strategy should be sorted out before £72m. is spent on an energy-from-waste plant. Deputy Roy Bisson said that in the light of the project's enormous cost, alternatives should be considered. 'The solid waste management plan certainly needs to be hammered out before any decision is made on the heat-treatment method, in accordance with the waste hierarchy described in solid waste management,' he said. 'More conventional systems that spread out the waste and recycle or compost as much as possible should be further investigated.' A senior spokesman for Access Skips, who did not wish to be named, supported in principle the Board of Administration's plan to build a mass-burn incinerator and the speed with which it wanted to put the plant into operation. The board estimates that Mont Cuet tip will be filled by 2014 and wants to start construction of the EfW plant, which will take two years to complete, as soon as possible. 'That we should incinerate is beyond doubt and it's a shame it's not happened earlier. There is an urgent and desperate need for it - they are quite rightly in a hurry. 'But I think that alternative technologies could be better investigated,' said the spokesman. 'The whole thrust of their argument is that you can't trust evolving technologies. It's true there are limited facilities, but they do exist and are substantially cheaper, but if things went wrong, we would have limited capacity to cope. 'To dismiss it out of hand, given the wildly-inaccurate estimates given by the States consultants about the cost, is mystifying. In the light of that, I wonder if alternative technologies couldn't be better reviewed.' At the Board of Administration's public presentation of its plans for a mass-burn incinerator at Longue Hougue, which, it said, was at the heart of its emerging waste strategy, questions were asked about the possibility of shipping waste to the Continent. 'If you look at America and other areas of Europe where they have progressive waste-management and segregation policies, they have been so successful that there's been a dramatic decrease in waste because people recycle, reuse and find alternative uses for waste. 'It is what governments try to promote and therefore there is less waste to burn. I am aware that in Germany, where there's a similar situation, they are actively looking for waste to incinerate.' The board looked at shipping to France, but said that plants had not been able to offer the capacity the island needed. The spokesman said that shipping further afield, to Germany, would not be prohibitively expensive. 'The difference between going to northern France and Germany is not that great. It's possible. 'Given the alarming increase in the cost of the facility that consultants suggested, I thought it might be worthwhile revisiting the logistics of shipment.'