FifeWest Action Group

Objection To Proposed Redevelopment Of Westfield Former Open-Cast Site

Background Information
Westfield was formerly the site of open-cast coal mining, and was left without restoration at the conclusion of operations. This was despite promises made before mining operations began that the site would be restored to agricultural and leisure use.

At present, Westfield houses a Chicken Litter Incinerator and a Gas Fired Power Station.

The surrounding communities of Benarty, Cardenden and Kinglassie, all close to Westfield, have carried a heavy burden of pollution over more than a century and this is reflected in health statistics (see below).

FifeWest Action Group believe that air quality would suffer drastically in these districts, further detrimenting the health of a population already suffering disproportionately.

These villages are officially designated Areas of Deprivation.

FifeWest Action Group approves of the maximum possible recycling of waste with minimum landfill, but wants Fife to have the best possible strategy for achieving this. Expert opinion is that waste should be separated at source using a three-bin system and recycling done in small units close to source dealing with Fife’s waste only.

The above strategy would share the load of waste disposal over the whole of Fife rather than focus this activity in an already disadvantaged area.

Alba Resource Recovery (the planning applicant, and a subsidiary of Scottish Coal) has been in negotiation with Highland Council over a contract to deal with waste from that area. Part of their negotiation regarded the proposed Westfield redevelopment.

[THE HIGHLAND COUNCIL ROADS, COMMUNITY AND PROTECTIVE SERVICES COMMITTEE WASTE STRATEGY WORKING GROUP minutes Tuesday 6th November 2001]

The Westfield site could be restored in other ways, as the nearby Lochore Meadows Country Park clearly demonstrates.

Summary of specific objections

Unnecessary Landfill
Fife currently has 60 years landfill capacity. This amounts to six times the amount of landfill Fife requires according to the National Waste Strategy. This capacity will increase as new EU directives to cut permissible annual landfill amounts come into force.

SEPA describe the Westfield site as "strategically significant", meaning that the site is ideally placed to accept waste from all over Scotland. This ideology disregards the ‘Proximity Principle’.

Landfill Leachate
A U.S. company specialising in testing the integrity of landfill sites found that 82% of the sites they tested leaked (in the US all landfill sites have to have this test). The plan for Westfield is for 43 landfill cells to be created. If we assume the same percentage of failure as they have found in the U.S. then 35 of the 43 landfill cells proposed WILL leak. This indicates that no matter what "best practice" Alba proposes the landfill leachate will most probably leak and considering that the Lochty Burn is lower than the site the likelihood is that any leachate will end up in the Burn. The proposal put forward by Alba is for a "reactive" monitoring system, i.e. the monitoring system will only detect leachate AFTER it has leaked which is too late! FifeWest Action Group are concerned that leachate from a landfill site at Westfield will contaminate ground water, pollute the Lochty Burn and eventually the River Ore which it meets in Coaltown of Balgonie in the South East of Glenrothes

Landfilling will not fill the huge hole at Westfield as another area of the site has been earmarked, where layers of waste and soil will eventually create a hill. This area lies a mere fifty metres away from the Lochty Burn.

The Material Recycling Facility (MRF) and Jobs
The proposed MRF will create around 100 jobs. The majority of these jobs will be for minimum wage. This kind of work is very unpleasant. FifeWest Action Group believe that by using the three-bin system whereby waste is separated at source, collected at kerbside and processed at small plants throughout Fife, that many more jobs would be created. These jobs would be less menial, more meaningful, more desirable, and would spread the burden of dealing with Fife’s waste.

The developers boast of achieving a 40% recycling rate immediately. Roughly half of this will be from composting organic waste. FWAG feel that this could be done more effectively at a local level - at home or within community composting schemes. This would have the added advantage of giving opportunities for education and community responsibility for the waste we all produce.

The rest, amounting to what the developers claim would be 100,000 tonnes of recyclate, would, after recovery, require to be exported from the site to be recycled.

Putting our faith in a massive state of the art materials separator also could lead to a disincentive to reduce the amount of waste produced. The developers will be reliant on a certain base level of waste to allow them to return a profit for their shareholders.

In a worst case scenario, if the developers entered into only one contract with a local authority for 250,000 tonnes of waste per year (roughly the annual amount of waste produced in Fife now), it is unlikely to be in that local authority's best interests to encourage reduction in waste produced. To do so, might risk the loss of that local authority's waste management resources.

A system founded on the scale of local requirement is the only environmentally sane option in FWAG's opinion.

Health
Fife Health Board representatives have informed FifeWest Action Group that prescription rates for Bronch-inhalers are significantly higher in the Ballingry and Lochore areas than they are in comparable practices in similarly deprived areas of Fife. This staggering statistic is a ‘proxy indicator’ to the air quality in this area.

[Note: "The rate for Westfield practices (population 22,000) was compared with a number of GP practices elsewhere in Fife (population 106,000) that have similar deprivation bandings. The rate per thousand practice population was 651.7 for Westfield practices and 489.3 for the non-Westfield practices- i.e. the rate for Westfield practices was higher."

– Information from Dr Charles Saunders, Consultant in Public Health Medicine (Communicable Disease & Environmental Health), Fife NHS Board]

These proposals must not go ahead. Instead a thorough investigation must be carried out before any more potentially polluting processes are brought to West Fife.

An increase in particulate pollution is not acceptable on any scale.

Environmental Justice?
An environmental impact assessment prepared by Babtie for Alba, referred to the area around Westfield thus:

"The urban areas of Ballingry and Lochore have a high tolerance to change of the type proposed due to the existing poor quality of the site and other industrial sites in the surrounding area, which will ensure that the development and landfill operations will not appear particularly inappropriate." Babtie EIA page 6.13

The essence of this assessment is that the area is run down, and nobody will notice (or care?) if it becomes the largest dumping ground for municipal waste in the country.

As part of the planning application, Alba will put in place a restoration bond for the site. This acts like an insurance policy, which can be claimed if the developer defaults on their requirement to leave the site fully restored.

ADDITIONALLY, a previous restoration bond worth £500,000 put in place for a development by Alba's parent company Scottish Coal in 1996, will be SURRENDERED by Fife Council. Basically, Fife Council will waive the right to claim against the restoration bond despite no restoration of the flooded hole having been carried out, and despite their being no likelihood of this restoration work EVER being carried out. Forgive us, then, if we are cynical about the prospects regarding this new, bigger restoration bond being proposed by Alba.

FifeWest Action Group will urge local councillors to honour their commitments to local people and vote against the proposal for the development of a Material Recycling Facility at Westfield.