6:29am Saturday 2nd August 2008
By Annie Riddle
PLANS to dispose of Salisbury's household refuse in a giant new incinerator instead of sending it to landfill have been delayed for a year.
The incinerator, at Colnbrook near Slough, has been hailed as a greener' solution to the problem of waste disposal, although environmental activists including Greenpeace strongly dispute this.
At present the non-recyclable contents of Salisbury residents' wheelie bins are bulked up' at the Thorny Down transfer station on London Road and taken by contractors Hills to their landfill site at Lower Compton, near Calne.
From July, under a countywide contract to cover the next 25 years at a cost of £300million, it was due to be incinerated instead.
But technical problems have surfaced during construction of the incinerator, and parts of it are having to be dismantled and rebuilt.
Until then, waste will continue to be sent to the landfill site.
The county council's contract will mean 50,000 tonnes of waste a year being sent for incineration. That is about a fifth of the total waste collected by local authorities in Wiltshire.
A county spokesman said: "Over the next few years Wiltshire needs to divert about 100,000 tonnes of waste per year from landfill, over and above the reduction achieved by the very encouraging increases in recycling and composting.
"The incinerator will provide about half the capacity we need. The county council is currently negotiating for additional capacity elsewhere."
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