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Delight at Leeds waste site victory
Campaigners today claimed a victory after controversial plans for a waste transfer facility in Leeds were shelved following months of protests.
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Schoolchildren from Kirkstall Valley Primary School in Burley were among hundreds of people objecting to the plans for the new expanded plant at Evanston Avenue in Kirkstall.
They even appeared in the YEP wearing face masks and started up their own YouTube campaign.
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The proposals were this week abandoned by Leeds City Council with the official reason that redeveloping the Kirkstall site was "not good value for money".
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This was after independent assessors working for the potential developer declared the project would cost too much.
However, campaigners said this was a "coincidence" considering the amount of local opposition – but they were "absolutely delighted" with the result.
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Sam Clarke, who has a child at Kirkstall Valley Primary School, said the reversal of the decision was "absolutely" a victory for the Waste Not Wanted campaign.
"They have just realised that it's common sense," she said.
If the Kirkstall plans had got the green light, the redeveloped Evanston Avenue site would eventually have been used as a temporary holding station for waste from west Leeds bound for a major new treatment facility in the east of the city.
Construction work is due to start in 2012 on the east Leeds plant, with a decision on its location due to be made shortly.
Two sites are under consideration to be its home – a former wholesale market at Cross Green and near Knostrop sewage works.
The thumbs-down for the Kirkstall plan means the east Leeds scheme will go ahead without a transfer station elsewhere in the city.
It will handle all of the local waste that currently goes for landfill at Skelton Grange in south Leeds and other sites in the UK.
Councillor James Monaghan, Leeds City Council's executive board member for environmental services, said : "We have been able to look at the costs quoted by contractors in the running to develop the (east Leeds] waste treatment facility and we can see it just wouldn't be good value for money to put a further dedicated transfer station at Kirkstall.
"The process of finding a way to deal with our non-recyclable waste has been open to a whole range of different options that we have to examine one-by-one, from different sites to different kinds of technology.
"This is just one option we have looked at and rejected as not value for money."
Leeds City Council had proposed reviving and expanding the Kirkstall plant on the same site where a former facility burned down in 2002.
However, locals feared a potential 100,000 tonnes of black bin waste a year and 65 lorries a day travelling past their homes would make the area "uninhabitable".
Rachel Reeves, a parliamentary hopeful for Leeds West, who has backed local opposition, said: "They have caved in because they have seen the reaction of the local community.
"They should have spoken to the community at the start instead of going through an expensive tendering process that was a waste of taxpayers' money.
"Well done to everyone who campaigned locally, schoolchildren, residents and parents."
Leeds secured 68.9m from the Government's Private Finance Initiative in 2008 towards the development of a new waste treatment facility.
The existing Kirkstall Road facility already operates as a waste sorting site as well as a transfer site for recyclable and other specialist wastes but not black bin waste.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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