18 April 2006 - A Surrey Euro-MP has called on Surrey County Council to scrap two proposed landfill sites and rule out rubbish incineration as part of a ‘zero-waste’ strategy.

Caroline Lucas said proposed landfill sites at Ewhurst Brick Works and Ockley suffered from poor access via narrow twisting lanes, border residential properties and fall within areas of outstanding natural beauty.

Dr Lucas, South-East England ’s Green Party MEP and a member of the European Parliament’s Environment Committee, said: “Landfilling waste is an environmentally destructive and wasteful way of dealing with waste anywhere – but these two sites are especially inappropriate.

“Both are reached along narrow, twisting roads entirely inappropriate for HGVs and large-scale refuse transport, and both are near residential properties whose residents would be intolerably blighted, by noise, litter and pollution if the sites were used for landfill.

“But perhaps an even more compelling reason is the aesthetic and scientific value of the sites: both are within areas of outstanding natural beauty as well as designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

“The proposed Ockley site as the location of a recent major discovery of archaeologically-important remains, whilst the Ewhurst Brick Works site is in a lake in the centre of an undisturbed wooded area which provides nesting sites for owls, bats, kingfishers and other bird species. Many similar lakes in the area are home to the rare and protected Great Crested Newt.”

Dr Lucas, speaking as Surrey County Council closed its public consultation on its draft waste plan, added: “These proposals are for the wrong facilities – landfill sites far from the urban areas largely responsible for creating the waste in the first place – in entirely the wrong locations.

“The County Council must go back to the drawing board and find a waste strategy that doesn’t involve creating new landfill sites – or incinerators - in the Surrey countryside.”

Surrey Green Party called for the council to reject waste incineration and instead pursue a ‘zero waste’ policy by improving recycling rates and establishing small, community-run recycling and composting facilities in allotments and other sites across the county.

ENDS