Waste permit policy doesn’t make sense

Oliver’s

SO, East Riding Council are congratulating themselves on saving £110,000 due to the introduction of waste disposal permits and consequently a reduction of 12 per cent of people using their tip. There is no mention of the cost of clearing up all the increased fly-tipping which has resulted from this policy.

Whilst I acknowledge that it is not only East Yorkshire which is implementing this, the whole thing is a nonsense when we are trying to reduce travel emissions due to pollution and climate change. Surely people should be able to use the tip nearest to where they live?

The East Riding Tip was an efficient, well organised and user-friendly place, with staff who did an excellent recycling job. Yorkshire is a massive county and someone living just outside the East Riding boundary could have to travel miles to dispose of their rubbish. Many people won’t bother and it will end up in landfill bins or dumped.

I would encourage everyone to take photos of rubbish tipped at the roadside or in the countryside and email them to the council’s waste management team.

Also a massive thank you to all the volunteer litter pickers in our area who do magnificent work. We live in a beautiful county and shouldn’t need to go for our walks armed with a rubbish bag. safe nuclear reactors for our submarines for over 50 years. Now they are upscaling that technology to produce factorybuilt small modular reactors, each of which will generate 470MW of zero carbon electricity for at least 60 years.

Already the Roll-Royce SMR consortium has signed a £3.7m contract with Sheffield Forgemaster, the world leaders in forgings and castings to design the forgings required.

Each of these reactors will produce enough electricity to power one million homes 365 days a year regardless of weather conditions. Each will require only a small site and the reactor is small enough to be transported by lorry.

The supply chain is British, although it has attracted investment from overseas. The export potential is huge. And their production will stimulate a renaissance in UK research and high-end technology; already Rolls-Royce has established 25 University Technology Centres throughout the country.

If we compare SMRs with wind farms, the benefits are obvious. Wind energy is intermittent. Last year there were many periods of calm conditions including one lengthy spell which recorded the calmest conditions for 10 years.

The more wind farms there are, the harder it becomes for National Grid’s control room at Warwick to balance the Grid as it must do at 50Hz.

While wind farms need millions of tonnes of concrete poured onto the countryside and hundreds of miles of access roads, SMRs do not scar the countryside.