MADAM – Every time anyone questions the incinerator contract, Messrs Hawthorne and Theodoulou of the GCC cabinet recite the same old mantra that “this £500million, 25-year contract will save Gloucestershire £150m compared with landfill”.

But they refuse to back up their simplistic finance with any kind of hard numbers.

My colleague Jane Green from Zero Waste England has taken an independent look at the likely root of Hawthorne and Theodoulou’s figures.

This whole saga kicked off when GCC published an Outline Business Case (OBC) back in 2008 which modelled costs for an incinerator as part of its bid for government PFI money.

The OBC calculated that the council would save around £250m compared with landfill over the contract, although this has been reduced to £150m.

But now following the government’s decision to cap landfill tax and the acceptance of tonnages in the Gloucestershire’s Waste Core Strategy (the planning document), we can make some calculations.

So here is the maths.

We have Landfill Tax capped at £80 per tonne, so combined with landfill gate fees (£21 per tonne) for 145,000 tonnes of waste per year (the highest prediction in GCC’s Waste Core Strategy) over 25 years results in a total cost of £366m.

Using these figures, landfill is £134m cheaper than the £500m quoted for pursuing the incinerator option.

And the more we recycle, the better those savings will be.

The really staggering point is that there are now far-cheaper alternatives to either the incinerator or landfill.

But it would seem that even staying with landfill would be significantly cheaper than the incinerator, contrary to the sadly out-dated figures that GCC continue to trot out.

Chris Harmer

Green Party member Nailsworth