Stop the incinerator on Rivenhall Airfield! - Healthy Life Essex

In spite of lots of opposition, it seems as if an incinerator will be built on Rivenhall Airfield. To make the plant viable, this will include bringing in tonnes of waste from outside Essex. The waste site as incinerator application is going to committee on Friday 24th April and a peacefull protest on the steps of County Hall is planned. If you oppose the application and are available to attend, your support wopuld be appreciated.

James Abbott, who is leading the appeal, says:

“Its crunch time.

The waste site and incinerator application is to go to committee on Friday 24th April, 10am County Hall (entrance via Duke Street). We do not expect anything other than a rubberstamping of the officer recommendation to approve, despite the overwhelming level of opposition and the clear policy breaches – the latest count is well over 800 objections from residents, councils and organisations.

Its not the end of the story though. We are preparing a file to go to Go-East urging a public planning inquiry – time is short though – we have probably less than 2 weeks. Part of that submission will be a short letter, signed by as many councillors and representatives of organisations as we can muster. If you are either a councillor or represent an organisation, and/or  can ask others in those catagories to sign, please get in touch as soon as possible. We already have the support of Lady Newton, Chair of BDC who said she will sign, along with many other parish and district councillors.

Please also now send the petitions to Go-East either direct – or to me and I will forward them.

There will be a peaceful, colourful protest on the steps of County Hall (main entrance) starting at 9am on Friday 24th. The press will be invited. Please do try and attend – we appreciate its early but we have to have it then as the meeting starts at 10am. We will bring plenty of the campaign placards and posters plus our new “Bank of Lord H” mock bank notes which emphasise that should these plans go through it would be a blatant breach of the pledges he personally made in the House of Lords and in letters to residents – and in the press – that there would be “No incineration without a referendum” in Essex (direct quote from Lords Hansard).

We have now posted some of the airfield photos and descriptions to a website. Owing to the amount of information and file sizes, it has not been possible so far to put them all up, and those we have put up have had to be reduced – but we are working on it. Also, the only site we have available, and the only peron offering to do this work, means it is on the Witham and Braintree Green Party site. Apologies if that is a problem, as we said, and remains the case, we are committed to keeping the campaign as cross-community as possible. If we get an offer for an independent hosting of the pictures, we will of course take it up. The link to the page is

http://witham-braintree.greenparty.org.uk/localsites/witham-braintree/news/new-pictures-show-scale-of-environmental-threat.html

If you want any of the pictures sent direct by e-mail, we can do that on request. The web pages do not cover all the images, but they do cover most of the vantage points.

Finally, thank you once again to everyone who is helping the campaign. Please feel free to forward this to anyone you think can attend on the 24th or who can sign the letter.”

For further information, please contact

James Abbott

01376 584576
07951 923073

For updates on the local campaign and national campaigns against incinerators, please visit
www.bugleonline.co.uk
and www.ukwin.org.uk