Waste incinerator: 'Time to find a solution is fast running out'

Published on Monday 4 May 2009 09:20

IN today's throwaway society, and with most goods bought from the supermarkets coming with unprecedented amounts of packaging, dealing with the city's growing mountain of waste is an increasing challenge for the city council.

Currently Edinburgh is faced with the problem of disposing of somewhere in the region of 250,000 million tonnes of household and commercial waste a year. Despite making massive inroads into disposing much of it in a green manner – largely through encouraging household and community recycling – its aging facilities such as Powderhall frankly do not have the capacity to deal with it.

The matter is complicated further by EU directives on how such mountains of waste are to be disposed of and the five Lothian and Borders councils face fines in the region of 18 million a year from 2013 if they don't significantly increase recycling levels and reduce their reliance on landfill sites. With this in mind the councils got together with the idea of building a massive incinerator to handle half of the region's waste. But this scheme fell apart after the goalposts were moved by a new government waste strategy which stipulated no more than 25 per cent of municipal waste could be disposed of in this way by 2025.

Following the collapse of the plan, Viridor, a private contractor which already transports millions of tonnes of the city's waste by train to a landfill site near Dunbar, offered an alternative collection solution when it proposed opening a massive waste depot near Portobello.

With Powderhall due to close in 2015 it must have been very tempting for councillors to look sympathetically at the application, considering the position they face regarding future plans for the disposal of their own waste. But rightly they turned it down – after 700 objections were submitted – on the grounds that it would have meant hundreds of lorries a day thundering through densely populated areas.

That still leaves the council with a problem. By 2013, only 50 per cent of 1995 levels of waste will be allowed to be sent to landfill, and by 2020 the target will be 35 per cent.

Even if recycling targets are met, there will be a need to incinerate a substantial amount of rubbish.

It is with this in mind that Edinburgh and Midlothian councils have now opted to work together to provide build one facility.

The plan to build it at Millerhill seems sound. Although there will be substantial increase in traffic it is in an isolated brownfield site and near to major roads. Doubtless there will be objections but it is to be hoped that they can be overcome.

Time to find a solution to our growing waste problem is fast running out.