From Chris McCarthy.
IT is never easy to accept that a mistake has been made. Even more difficult if it is a big mistake.
I am in no doubt that the vote to go full steam ahead with the proposed incinerator, regardless of warnings, will prove to be one of the greatest economic, social and environmentally disastrous decisions made to date. The disaster could have been avoided. It will become known as our Titanic.
No doubt we would all have preferred the French not to have constructed a nuclear power station so near to our islands. After a nuclear power station, the next most potentially hazardous way of making energy is from burning solid waste.
The difference between a French nuclear power station and the Jersey proposed waste incinerator power station is that this one is our own choice.
It is our choice whether or not we decide to take the health risk to have a solid waste incinerator upwind of the most densely populated area of Jersey, with most of our schools in its plume.
More than three million people die prematurely worldwide due to poor air quality compared to one million in car accidents.
Remember from your first-year physics that ‘mass cannot be destroyed’?
All that the incinerator will do is convert the solid inert waste into toxic particles — and these will either end up in the air that we breathe or in the Island’s soil and water.
Jersey is known worldwide to have great fresh air from the Atlantic.
So why have we decided to destroy this great natural environmental blessing with an incinerator when there are so many alternatives for managing waste as set out in numerous reports previously
commissioned by the States which, for some unknown reason, have been discarded?
I am not in agreement with the decision to proceed in order to save the Island £50m.
I believe that the decision to proceed will lose a further £100m when its detrimental effect becomes evident with the health deterioration of Islanders.
This will understandably lead to the parishes reaching the same decision as St Helier not to supply waste, which harms the health of its communities. Thus giving us a black elephant to pair up with the white elephant on the neighbouring hill.
When the unsustainable economic, social and environmental catastrophe of this inappropriate solid waste plant becomes apparent, the project will close, and the true costs of this big mistake will be understood.
I would hope that those responsible for further wasting public money will be justifiably made accountable for their decision to proceed.
Dog and Duck Yard,
Princeton Street,
London.
