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Forum topic: Most every car in the UK being used to offset our new incinerator?

Most every car in the UK being used to offset our new incinerator?

Karl Brown

06 Feb 2021 11:32 #5858

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HMG are intending to switch petrol grades from E5 (containing 5% biofuel) to E10 on standard “95” fuel sometime this year as part of the UK’s net zero plans. This doubling of bio content will apparently save 750,000 tonnes of CO2 pa - or the equivalent of a new Edmonton incinerator! With tens of millions of cars driving about the UK, this revelation put the scale of the incinerator’s impact into a completely different orbit for me.
The 15 year term North London Waste Plan, now in its 14th year of development, includes two themes:
• A spread of waste sites to ensure their close proximity to waste production; and
• A focus on meeting North London’s calculated waste needs.
The planned incinerator, a single site and serving much more than the local area, conflicts with both.
I believe other issues will shortly see the failure of this plan at inspection, so requiring another 6 years or so of effort and sunk resource, but its fundamental problems do primarily root back to seeking to square an intractable circle of capturing an over-large incinerator plus Pinkham Way, both waste authority demands, rather than our councils developing a plan responding to a transparent strategy and actual data.
Perhaps the 13 year - and counting - Putinesque term of the waste authority Chair is too long in a world where things move quickly and often radically. (Consider, at appointment Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister, him being before Cameron, him before May and she being before Johnson.) Would it be unreasonable in a hugely influential public authority, one having no public democratic oversight, to see a maximum-term cap of perhaps 5 or 6 years on such a key position? After all a new broom ensures old ideas are not set in stone; it demands the development of a succession plan or process; helps mitigate the risk of cronyism; and ensures competition and challenge, the inevitable precursor to idea enhancement and general progress.
With the track record to date do we really want to be funding and digging the same hole over and over again? As with auditors, presidents and much more, a maximum term of appointment has much in its favour, and that seems to be within the power of North London’s councillors to implement.

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