UP to five incinerators could be built in addition to the Great Blakenham plant agreed last week as county planners draw up proposals to end nearly all landfill in Suffolk.

Graham Dines

UP to five incinerators could be built in addition to the Great Blakenham plant agreed last week as county planners draw up proposals to end nearly all landfill in Suffolk.

Eye airfield, the former sugar factory at Sproughton, an industrial estate in Stanton and two other sites in Great Blakenham have been earmarked as suitable locations to deal with residual waste from commercial and business premises.

The �500million Great Blakenham incineration project - given the name energy from waste because electricity will be generated - will deal with household waste from throughout Suffolk.

But that still leaves up to 600,000 tonnes a year from commercial and business premises which will have to be disposed of if the county is to meet tough Government and European directives on ending landfill.

Although contractors will be able to deal with waste disposal by any suitable process, the county has conceded that incinerators could be built on all five sites.

Great Blakenham could end up with three incinerators - the county-wide household facility on the county's transport depot which was named last week, a residual waste facility on the same site, and a further residual waste plant at Masons landfill.

Public consultations will now be held in the autumn before a final list is approved for submission to the Government which will then conduct an examination in public.

Guy McGregor, who is the Cabinet portfolio holder for waste, said the county council as waste planning authority had to make arrangements to deal with the volumes of waste expected in the county by 2026.

It was under a legal obligation to identify how many sites would be required and to put forward sites to be subjected to an examination in public chaired by a government inspector.

Mr McGregor said: “Traffic, smell, noise and visual impact will be examined in great detail by the inspector. It is unlikely that any residual waste treatment facility will come on stream before 2014 or 2015 when planning applications, construction, and commissioning have been completed.

“The objective is to reduce the reliance on landfilling. Recycling and recovery rates need to continue to increase but provision needs to be made in the county for facilities to deal with the residual waste that is left over.”

It would be down to companies bidding for the contracts to decide which method to use, including mechanical and biological treatment, anaerobic digestion and incineration.

More than 20 protestors attended a meeting of the county's Cabinet yesterday, and a petition was handed into council leader Jeremy Pembroke objecting to the selection of Shepherds Grove industrial estate, a disused airfield on the Hepworth/Stanton border.

Four additional sites for disposing of non-toxic waste which cannot be disposed of by any other method than landfill have also been identified by the county council. These are at the existing landfill sites of Layham near Hadleigh and Foxhall near Ipswich, the former mineral working at Thorington near Halesworth, and Masons landfill site at Great Blakenham.