York Residents Against Incineration

The battle against the Yorkshire Incinerator received a huge boost today when Harrogate Borough Council voted to “strongly oppose” the plans. Not a single member of the planning committee spoke in favour of the scheme, which was roundly criticised on financial, planning, environmental, heritage, landscape and health grounds. Several speakers expressed the view that the [...]

Just a quick one- Friends of the Earth are running an online petition calling on Caroline Spelman (Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) to divert food waste into animal feed and compost, instead of incineration or landfill. 16 million tonnes of food is wasted each year, with much of it ending [...]

Minister for the Environment, Caroline Spelman, has told Norfolk Council that she will withhold £169 million funding for their incinerator project. Norfolk Council had been warned in June that they need to demonstrate a “broad local consensus” for the project, which has attracted huge opposition locally. On Friday it was announced that the Government was [...]

The planning application is validated and under consideration. Now is the time to lodge your objections and call for a public enquiry. The reference for the application is NY/2011/0328/ENV – it is important that you quote this. The application can be viewed on North Yorkshire County Council’s Planning Portal – you can object here online [...]

An incinerator plan for St Dennis in Cornwall has been thrown out by the High Court, after being given the nod by Minister for the Promotion of Rubbish and Overdevelopment, Eric Pickles. The incinerator was part of a waste contract (PFI, inevitably) drawn up between Cornwall County Council and SITA UK in 2006. It would [...]

North Yorkshire County Council confirmed that it has received an application for the ‘Allerton Waste Recovery Park’. The application is currently going through basic checking, so it is not yet possible to send objections. However it is vital that we get this application examined at public inquiry. Only the Planning Inspectorate has the objectivity to [...]

Nestle announced on Wednesday that it has achieved its target of a zero waste factory, four years ahead of target. Read The Press article here. When we started talking about adopting a ‘zero waste’ strategy, waste strategy officers said we were naive and that zero waste was impractical (despite the Lib Dems putting in in [...]

The new Labour administration that took over the running of the Council in May seems to be talking up zero waste, announcing a launch day for a ‘zero waste York’ campaign. The elections saw incinerator convert and NIMBY Councillor Steve Galloway lose the seat he has held for almost four decades, along with his protege, [...]

And another one falls… the Secretary of State has refused permission for the Rufforth Colliery incinerator after a public inquiry. This shows how incinerators are not a done deal just because the Council supports them. The inspector found that the proposed Energy Recovery Facility would “intrude into the openness of the countryside”, create the “potential [...]

On April 20th the Council issued an enforcement notice for the site of the North Selby Mine, demanding that UK Coal clear the site of all buildings and machinery related to its use as a mine. This is to comply with the original planning permission, which required the land to be returned to agricultural use [...]