2 June - Drip, drip, drip. Money, money money
It was interesting to see
the photo of Councillor Francis yesterday
campaigning against the plans for an incinerator in Belvedere 24 years ago; it made not a
scrap of difference because the move towards wrecking pretty much everything in this country is unstoppable.
The smoke factory
opened in May 2011 and got its
first mention on Bonkers four months later.
In June 2011 Bexley Council admitted that poisonous plumes are
a huge
Business Rate money spinner. (See the paragraph just below Councillor Craske’s photo.)
By 2014 57,000 tonnes of waste was being sent
for burning annually at a cost to Councils, Bexley included, of £103 a tonne. The money goes
around and around. Cory Environmental gives some of it back to a grateful Bexley Council which, for example
had in mind spending it on the Belvedere Splash Park.
Unfortunately Bexley Council was
looking for half a million while Cory was thinking in terms of £160k. But we got
a bridge out of the arrangement too.
Having got their way on the incinerator, Cory returned cap in hand
in 2016 asking for permission to ship in another 110,00 tonnes of waste a year by road. Drip, drip, drip.
Not content with a double sized incinerator Cory also wanted
to build a data centre to use up spare electricity generation - all over a
wildlife site. There were protests of course; I attended one in April 2016 but Bexley
Council needed the money
and doesn’t like to be reminded of it.
Another two years and Cory was back again. By this time they were processing
750,000 tonnes of rubbish and were looking to raise the total by another 655,000
tonnes with a second incinerator and a 20 megawatt battery to store the electricity. The following April
(2019) it was all rubber stamped. The money spinner was running at full tilt; well not quite.
The nature reserve was under renewed threat.
Bexley Labour Group put out a Press Release.
An inquiry was held and Sadiq Khan became involved but all to no avail. Money talks and by 2023 we had
the largest incinerator in Europe (Leader’s report last November) making nonsense of Khan’s ULEZ and the
roads are being disrupted by the installation of
new
electricity distribution cables.
Has Cory reached the end of the road after 15 years of extension by stealth? No
way, they now want to compulsorily purchase a great chunk of the Crossness
Nature Reserve in order to store waste before dumping it in disused North Sea
oil wells. To make the land purchase they need the agreement of the Secretary of State.
Birds, bees, voles and dragonflies will be destroyed and there is a huge amount
of interesting information about the loss of wildlife on
the Nature
Reserve Website along with how you might help with the campaign and donate.
There are only two weeks left to
register an objection.
Rarely has there been a better example of ‘give these people an inch and they will take a mile’.
How it was supposed to look and the reality. The trees must have died.
Note: Several of the linked pages have been restored from the
archive of withdrawn blogs and the links within them may not all work correctly.