A certain party is busy trumpeting the fact that almost no waste from Wealden goes to landfill.
There is no landfill site in Sussex. So of course we don’t send our waste to landfill.
Instead, we burn our waste. Wealden DC drives it across the district to Newhaven’s incinerator. The incinerator generates some power, but it’s absolutely not the best way to solve our waste problem. It’s polluting, creates greenhouse gases, and burns waste that could be recycled.
Wealden’s recycling record is unimpressive
In 2018, Wealden was 71st out of 345 councils for composting, reusing and recycling our waste. Not bad, at first sight, but at 51.3% Wealden is way behind the best-performing councils who achieve 64%. And since those figures came out, East Sussex County Council – led by the Conservatives who are so keen to pretend they are Green - has shut the local, busy, recycling centres at Forest Row and Wadhurst. The picture above is of the busy centre at Forest Row on its last day. Following these short-sighted closures, there is no way we are still recycling and reusing at the same rate.
Waste collection – poor contract, poor management
Wealden has a shaky record of collecting our waste in the first place, thanks to poorly negotiated and managed contracts with Keir, from which they have just extracted themselves. We all know how many missed collections there have been over the last couple of years. And we’ve all seen our carefully separated recycling thrown into the general waste collection when a lorry finally arrived a week or more late. Where is it going? Off to the incinerator.
Incinerators are a growth industry driven by profit
Maybe poor waste collections worked in Wealden District Council’s favour? A recent piece in the Daily Mail highlighted the uncontrolled growth in incinerators in Britain. Councils have locked themselves into long contracts with the incinerators that force them to send waste to the incinerator that could be recycled.
The piece quotes Professor Peter Edwards of Oxford University’s Chemistry Department as saying that incinerating waste, “can be harmful, and incineration, of course, also produces high levels of greenhouse gases.”
Incinerator owners’ profit comes before recycling – just as Keir’s profits came before providing a good waste collection service.
Green solutions
The Green Party believes in finding the best ways to reduce the amount of waste we all produce, and recycling as much waste locally as possible. In Wealden, we are working with others to find ways to run local recycling centres sustainably. We want to reopen Forest Row's recycling centre. We are also working with local businesses to look for ways to reduce excessive packaging and throw-away plastics.
