Looking to the future the county council remains committed to being open and honest with local residents around Four Ashes. I sincerely hope this ‘blog’ will play an important role in ensuring you have access to useful information.

If you have any questions about these proposals then please email comment@staffsprojectw2r.info. I will try to respond to the most frequently asked questions in future entries.

June 2008 – The Last Few Weeks

The last few weeks have been busy as we have worked to finalise the planning application to develop an Energy from Waste facility at Four Ashes. The full application is now available on this website. Please click here to read and download the documentation.

Later this week my colleagues and I will be at Calf Heath Village Hall as part of our two-day exhibition that will provide local residents with further information. The exhibition also offers another opportunity to get answers to any questions you might have about the proposals. If you would like further details please call 0845 300 4430.

Whilst we have been preparing the planning application we have continued to receive general questions about Staffordshire’s waste strategy and the need to develop this facility at Four Ashes. I thought I would use my latest blog to respond to some of these most frequently raised issues.

Many people have voiced the opinion that we simply don’t need this plant as we won’t have the waste to put in it. Believe me, if our studies had shown that we don’t need the plant we would be the first people to point this out. The county has no desire to spend taxpayers’ money when we don’t have to. However, long-term waste projections coupled with growth in Staffordshire’s population and housing numbers show that waste volumes will continue to grow, albeit slowly until 2016. We hope waste growth, despite an increasing population, will be almost zero by 2020. This means that if we are to avoid land filling our waste, and want to put the waste which we cannot recycle to good use, the plant is entirely necessary.

Does the plant mean that we will discourage recycling? Simply no; not in any way. The size of the plant is based on the assumption that we will recycle and compost at least 55% of our household waste. We are delighted that some areas in the county are already recycling more than 55%. We plan to encourage further recycling in the years to come. In the meantime we have to base our analysis on an average for the entire county. This means that even if some areas are recycling more than 55%, some are still below this level and it would be unrealistic to hope that we can get everyone to even higher rates. To do so would mean placing all our eggs in one basket and hoping that every single person in Staffordshire does absolutely everything they can to recycle as much waste as possible.

That said, in the situation where we are successful in getting our recycling rates even higher then the ‘spare’ capacity of the facility would be used to process commercial waste. Commercial waste is no different from household waste other than it is produced by businesses. Currently in Staffordshire we produced twice as much commercial waste than household waste, the majority of which gets sent to landfill.