AN ENVIRONMENTAL campaigner has criticised Swindon Council’s decision to spend £54 million in the next 10 years building and running a thermal treatment centre rather than raising awareness about recycling.

Julian Kirby, a resource-use campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said he is mystified as to why Swindon Council would want to burn waste – which is the ‘second worst’ way to dispose of rubbish according to the waste hierarchy it supports.

He said that communities with incineration plants almost always have poorer recycling rates because it takes the authorities and residents’ focus away from conservation.

The plans, which the council say will save £26m in the next decade, would mean that everything contained in black bags – whether that be plastic bottles or batteries – will end up being burned.

Mr Kirby said: “The council will make the claim that they will only burn items that are not recyclable, but some communities in Europe recycle 70 per cent of their waste, so we know that much of what will be burned could be recycled.

“The council will also say that it will also make energy from this waste but it will be done so inefficiently that it will be worse than a gas power station and the technology is still largely unproven.

“Landfill needs to be used less and less but burning our waste is not the answer in the modern world.

“Most things are recyclable including organic matter (food and garden waste), paper, plastic, cardboard and wood – so what needs to be burned?

“Even nappies can be recycled these days.”

He added that the council needs to look to Europe to see how much can be removed from its waste – which he claims is up to 20 per cent more – before considering incineration.

But the council disagrees and expect the borough’s first advanced thermal treatment plant to be built at the household recycling centre, in Cheney Manor Industrial Estate, by 2011.

Swindon could even get 13 small-scale incinerators throughout the town within the next 10 years, burning 130,000 tonnes of combined commercial and municipal waste.

However Richard Fleming, the council’s head of waste management, said the council had invested £20m over the past few years in recycling schemes and would continue to do so.

He said: “This solution will give us a lot of flexibility to continue to promote recycling and composting by using small-scale local plants that we can buy into or out of as and when we need them.

“That helps us stop sending waste to landfill and recover heat and power for the residents.

“This is new technology that will have much better efficiency at recovering heat than traditional incinerators and current fossil fuel power stations.

“We will continue to promote recycling and composting before using recovery of energy and will continue to do so.”

SWINDON Council’s current recycling rate is 47.5 per cent of its waste but the authority’s goal is to reach zero waste to landfill by 2016.

This means the council is hoping for a huge jump in the borough’s recycling rates, otherwise the next likeliest option will be incineration.

Friends of the Earth suggest focusing on the waste hierarchy, which the council has signed up to, and refers to the ‘3Rs’ of reduce, reuse and recycle.

The ‘3Rs’ are meant to be a hierarchy, in order of importance and are listed as the following: prevention, minimisation, reuse, recycling, energy recovery, disposal.

Richard Fleming, the council’s head of waste management, said: “We are trying to make sure people don’t put recyclable materials in their black bins and are really educating them to boost recycling rates.”

He was also keen to state the difference between an incinerator and a thermal treatment system.

He said: “The difference between this and an incinerator is the same as the difference between a microwave and a log burner.

“This is a thermal treatment system that produces gas rather than heat and flames.”