Tuesday 20 August 2019

Viridor – fires, secondary aggregates, and 160,000 road miles cut pa

Viridor, part of Pennon Group the owner of South West Water, has been in the news recently. Viridor burns our rubbish. And not only that.




Viridor lists ten of these "Energy Recovery Facilities" on its website – including Exeter. According to Inside Croydon there have been 14 fires at Viridor plants since 2015, five in 2019 alone:
This outbreak of dangerous and costly fires – especially costly for Viridor’s insurers – has seen the company become increasingly dependent on a "fourth emergency service", their PR consultants, who are regularly being called out to act as their reputational firefighters.
The independent councillor of the ward where one of these fires took place told Inside Croydon:
In my view, Viridor are a menace to local communities and the environment.
Viridor are becoming a major burden on the nation’s fire brigades. They need reporting to the Health and Safety Executive.

Whatever the merits, or not, of energy-from-waste – "critics argue that incinerators destroy valuable resources and they may reduce incentives for recycling" – the waste material from such incinerators – incinerator bottom ash, IBA – can be used to produce secondary aggregates, an alternative to quarried material. Residues from the flue stacks can also be used in the production of aggregates.

After its various fires, two last month, Viridor’s PR machine was obviously keen to point to some better news, and this month turned its attention to the South West – where the company has set out plans to cut annual road miles by more than 160,000, by moving IBA by rail from Cardiff to Avonmouth, where it will be turned into secondary aggregates. According to Viridor:
It is part of Viridor’s commitment to seeing waste as a resource and not rubbish, identifying a purpose for all materials.
Aggregate Industries also has eyes on a resource – a primary, virgin, unsustainable, irreplaceable sand and gravel resource at Straitgate Farm. Unlike Viridor, however, it plans to add 100,000s of road miles each year – some 2.4 million in total. Climate emergency? Not at Aggregate Industries.

Aggregate Industries wants to quarry this resource "at a rate between 120,000 tonnes and 180,000 tonnes per annum" – destroying an East Devon farm in its wake; risking groundwater supplies to 100 people, farms, listed buildings and ancient woodland; ripping out ancient hedgerows, habitat for dormice and bats. Each 29 tonne as-dug load of sand and gravel would necessitate HGVs making a round trip of some 46 miles, for processing at a site that has 4 million tonnes of permitted sand and gravel reserves already being worked. Madness indeed.

Assuming 150,000 tonnes pa, Aggregate Industries would put an additional 240,000 HGV miles on the South West’s roads each year; this, of course, being the company which claims "#sustainability is at the heart of everything we do 🙌".

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