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 Village News Magazine |
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This page was last updated on
Sunday March 25, 2007
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| County Councillor David Harrison's Report |
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| County Councillor David Harrison |
Marchwood villagers have, for many years now, been living very closely with processes involved with managing waste and minerals.
As your County Councillor, I was recently invited to contribute towards planning a Hampshire - wide strategy – very much a first look at places that might be suitable to be used for managing waste.
To put things in context, attitudes towards waste are changing rapidly. Waste is now seen as a resource. The County Council has been stunningly successful in reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfill. This has been reduced to about 19% of total waste now, with plans to reduce it to zero in future years. This compares very favourable with other European countries.
Hampshire has 26 recycling centres, all contributing to the fact that we presently recycle 21% of our waste. Composting accounts for about 9%, whilst the three Energy Recovery facilities, (one being “The Dome” in Marchwood), eats through a massive 51% of the waste stream. The other benefit is that enough electricity is generated to power about 40,000 homes.
Waste is incredibly expensive to handle. Taxpayers in the County pay about £90 million a year to deal with waste, including the cost of collection that is carried out by Borough and District Authorities.
I take the view that Marchwood has already hosted enough in the way of waste handling facilities and “enough is enough”. I’m happy to report that Officers and even Members representing other areas seemed to accept this was the case.
The one exception to this might be an application to make permanent the temporary permission given for a waste transfer site, off Bury Road. If this happens, I want to see a major gain for users of the amenity waste site. The County Council is drawing up plans for a re-designed site that will accommodate more vehicles (preventing the need for them to queue up on roads). I am also demanding a split-level system of waste disposal. This means doing away with the need to climb up and down the metal steps to throw waste materials in a skip.
I’m very hopeful that we can work much smarter in the future, reducing the costs involved in dealing with waste, whilst causing less environmental harm. Even major commercial interests seem to be climbing on board, a good example being Tesco which is doing a great deal more than reducing the need for carrier bags.
The one area where I think we need to do much better is at the front end – all that unnecessary packaging! If we didn’t produce unnecessary materials, we could save a lot of money by not having to manage the materials afterwards. We are all shoppers, perhaps we could consider this when next deciding what to buy? |
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