Diana followed up Devon County Council’s response to our initial letter about Particulart on 21 December 2014 by email:
Just a note to thank you for taking the time to give a thorough response to our letter.
I remain concerned that the long term health impacts aren’t being assessed and I will feed that into the low emissions strategy plan feedback for ECC.
The Government document on the guidance in relation to reducing contractor costs did seem to me to include PPP contracts and I hope the Council can follow that up. How much is the value of the contract with Viridor?
I do hope that DCC will look to introduce a zero waste strategy over the coming years, rather than continuing with these incineration plans.
Perhaps just before Christmas wasn’t the best time to write, and a bit of prodding was required. It elicited the following response on 13 February 2015:
The value of the Exeter Efw contract is around £210 million over the contract term. As you can imagine the investment to build these plants is significant – approx £46 million for the Exeter facility. Hence the contracts for their operation have to be for a longer term duration in order to cover the capital and operational costs.
The County Council working in partnership with its Districts are committed through our Waste & Resource Management Strategy (http://www.devon.gov.uk/dcc_waste_strategy_review.pdf) to manage waste at the top of the waste hierarchy promoting waste reduction, re-use and recycling before recovery and we have high targets to aim for. Devon is still among the top performers nationally for recycling and the opening of the Exeter and Plymouth plants will not affect that. The Efw plants are being used to divert waste away from landfill and recover value from it, not to impact on waste reduction, re-use and recycling.
