Environment Agency 'minded to accept' Teesside incinerator plans
The body held its first consultation over whether or not to grant an environmental permit to the incinerator late last year.It said it was now launching a second consultation because it could not "find any reason to refuse" the application, but was "yet to make a final decision".EA official Gary Wallace said the organisation was keen to hear people's views on the incinerator and that it would make its final decision following the consultation.
The incinerator would take waste from homes in Newcastle, Durham, Darlington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, as well as Stockton and Redcar and Cleveland council areas.Newcastle City Council's director of operations and regulatory services previously said there were no "affordable alternative" to the plans.Paul Foster, from Stop Incineration North East, said the group planned to lodge more objections with the EA over the incinerator.The group protested the plans last month, arguing that people's waste should be recycled rather than burned.Project partners from TVERF previously said facilities like the planned Energy from Waste (EfW) incinerator were a "reliable and safe technology" which had been subject to "intense regulatory and academic scrutiny over decades of operation"."The project represents the safest, most reliable and most sustainable way to manage our region's residual waste," they said.The local authorities involved in the scheme have been approached for comment.
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It was supposed to make my life easier, but within an hour I was the most loathed man in the room. Thirty years ago, while working as a reporter for a newspaper in the North-East of England, I was compelled by my employers to attend a 'stress management' course. Over two days inside a stuffy meeting room at St James' Park, I would be taught techniques to make me happier and more efficient. The course leader decided to begin proceedings with a general knowledge quiz. This, he said, would place us in a real-life stress situation. The quiz was not in the slightest bit stressful. The aftermath, on the other hand… I came top in the quiz, by some distance. I'm not saying my fellow stress managers were idiots but I'm hardly the fizziest drink in the fridge and I didn't get a question wrong. Having marked myself out, by knowing the name of the capital of Brazil, as having airs and graces, I was treated with suspicion by the others. 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