It's a small line buried in Aggregate Industries' infamous Transport Assessment. It tells us that 90% of the material that AI wants to win from Straitgate Farm, and take to Hillhead for processing, would eventually be sold into the Exeter market.
Material processed at Hillhead in Uffculme would be 9.5 miles further away from the Exeter market than it would be if it were processed locally, say at Rockbeare. At 20 tonne average loads (TA 8.10) onward distribution of 90% of the ‘1.2 million tonnes saleable’ from Straitgate would require 54,000 loads, or 108,000 HGV movements. Each movement would incur an additional 9.5 miles or 1.03 million miles in total, and an additional 183kg of PM10, 11 tonnes of NOX, 1523 of tonnes CO2, using these figures.
Add that to the 2.5 million miles and associated emissions that it would take to get the material to Hillhead in the first place, and we're now looking at about:
It's hardly surprising that NONE of this information was in AI's application, and it makes a further mockery of this statement:
The Applicant considers that the highway infrastructure improvement measures included in both planning applications [Birdcage & Clay Lane] are sufficient to outweigh the negative impact of transporting the Straitgate minerals to Hillhead Quarry for processing and, therefore, overcome the apparent conflict with Policy M22. 5.4.11
