Challenge to reduce our waste

SIR, – Could I ask Aberdeen City Council why the city alone in 2001 recommended an incinerator to burn 160,000 tonnes of waste per annum, when now it seems, only 15 years later, a 150,000 t/an plant capacity is all we need to burn waste for the combined city, Aberdeenshire and Moray?

Has our residual waste volume plummeted by two thirds over this short period, or was the original just too big? Twenty years ago, I too thought the Swedish model of burning residual waste for energy seemed sensible. However, after much investigation, I now believe that Energy from waste (EFW) plants “let us off the hook”, by allowing us to burn unseparated residual (black bin) waste using highly complex plant to burn low energy waste, having a calorific value a quarter that of oil.

And these European plants are now looking for waste to burn to keep them viable. In the well-established EU waste hierarchy, waste minimisation, reuse, recycling, composting and anaerobic digestion are all preferred to burning and landfill. Which of these developments, apart from recycling, has ACC been involved in? None.

Well done Grant Keenan, with his food composting business in New Deer, for filling the vacuum left by ACC.

Sure, we cannot continue landfilling waste, but can the council not give us Aberdeen citizens the challenge of reducing our waste, recycling more, so that the put-upon residents of Torry do not have to accept the economic and environmental impacts caused by the thoughtless discards of the well-off from the leafy suburbs of the city and shires? Bob Pringle, Abergeldie Road, Aberdeen. Douglas Tait, St Columba’s, Lonmay. Of course, we have to accept that we are in a remote area being a few miles from the largest pelagic fishing port in Europe, not to mention being within sight of the gas terminal that supplies 25% of the UK’s gas