Sorting the muck from the brass or knowing your Argus from your elbow
According to some ‘Hollingdean whingers’ should ‘stop talking rubbish’, the nimby’s living around the proposed WTS/MRF have to understand that waste has to be dealt with somewhere and the former abattoir site is the best possible location.
Proponents of this view, led apparently by The Argus’ very own muck raker, Adam Trimingham, are clearly misinformed or rather rely on the Brighton & Hove City Council, spokespeople for Veolia South Downs, for their information.
Trimingham and his ilk need to examine some pretty important facts before they start spouting off. The Deceitful Argus Blogger (DABs) has blackened the name of journalists as informed informants of the public aimed at the public good.
He, DAB’s, a member of the wittering classes whose ill-informed columns litter the press, accuses DTD members of being nothing but chatterers whose views he can dismiss with a cursory wave of the hand. He obviously knows little about the group he claims to know so well.
When you break DAB’s opinions down it comes down to about three different views. Trash has to go somewhere (so it might as well be The Argus?).
You may think my little bracketed dig at Dab’s is a little uncalled for, but consider this, if you build a tip you get associated problems. These include fire hazards which can release toxic fumes into the air. Such events are not uncommon as the recent fire in Bromley, South London, bears witness to.
Bromley residents in a wide area around this WTS were told to go home, close all windows and sit tight while men in full body suits and breathing apparatus were called in to deal with the release of toxic fumes.
Should our children be put at risk? What right do BHCC and Veolia have to threaten the well-being of children in this way.
DAB’s also refers to the fact that the Hollingdean site has been a light industrial area for close to 200 years, arguing it seems that once a dump it should always remain so, precluding any improvement in the locale for its residents.
An argument here for the brain dead, what DAB’s fails to say is that when the Victorians developed the Hollingdean site for use in handling the city’s waste it was on the edge of town, not in the middle of it.
The Hollingdean site is now surrounded by residential developments on all sides and that includes two schools in very close proximity, one would be only 12 metres from the dump at the closest point. Not even the Dickensian developers of yesteryear, who sent children up chimneys, had that brilliant idea.
Then there is the view that the former abattoir site is ‘the best place’ for a dump of all the possible sites in terms of access and proximity to where waste is produced.
This is probably the most insidious argument of them all. Obviously DAB’s has never visited Hollingdean Lane otherwise he’d know that for one thing a 44 tonne truck arriving from the Vogue Gyratory will have to negotiate passing beneath a Victorian arched rail bridge, with some 4cm clearance, and immediately take a right turn as the road dog legs around the corner.
Network Rail, whose job it is to maintain mainline rail links to and from Brighton, are justifiably livid at the proposal. But that aside the area from VG to the bridge has already been designated, by the council, as an Air Quality Management Area because of the excessive traffic fumes.
Even BHCC and Veolia accept that an increase in pollution in this area is inevitable, but, they say it’s already bad so it doesn’t matter if it gets worse.
What an argument??!! Let’s take this mind-boggling philosophical insight down its very obvious path to see where we end up. Battered children have already been hurt so we can hit them harder? Or perhaps hospital patients are already unwell so we can feed them poison??
BHCC also argues that they will reduce pollution by shortening the trip a truck makes to the tip. This is hard to believe, traffic levels will rise to unprecedented levels in a narrow two lane street, trucks will stand idling unable to move due to the gridlock and the council thinks that is environmentally beneficial.
In fact the most inefficient time for any truck or car is when it is stood still with its engine running.
Of course DAB’s also alludes, in passing, to the other possible sites that were considered, Hangleton Bottom and Shoreham Harbour, dismissing the first because it is a Greenfield site and the other because it has poor access.
The first is indeed a Greenfield site, in fact it is designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty… And then they built a six-lane motorway through it!!
Shoreham Harbour would also have the possibility of using barges to move waste to Newhaven if you really want to incinerate the stuff, a far more environmentally friendly way of moving large amounts of anything and far cheaper than a truck in a traffic jam.
But if Veolia and BHCC have seriously considered these sites there is no evidence of it. They have produced not a single report costing the use of these other possible sites.
One has to ask why not? The answer came to me from a Brighton MP, David Lepper. It seems that to use an area of land for waste disposal requires a permit, not from the council, but from the Environment Agency. Hollingdean already has that licence, successfully applying for such a permit elsewhere costs money.
Should money be a consideration? Well if your answer to that question is no, then consider the cost of other white elephants, the Dome in South London for example. Of course money has to be carefully used.
However, if your answer is yes also consider that the regulations around waste management are changing and in the coming years towns that produce carbon emissions, or fail to recycle sufficient percentages of waste will be penalised with a carbon tax.
By around 2015, nine year’s time, Brighton & Hove will have to recycle 70% of its waste. Incineration and landfill will attract punitive carbon taxes. So if you have a nine-year old child at an infants school, any Brighton & Hove infants school not just one on the edge of this development, by the time they start work they will be paying local taxes for the errors in planning made by us. That goes for DAB’s and his kind too.
posted by Dump the Dump at 11:24 AM
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