Six concerned doctors are among the hundreds of worried Sutton residents who have filed objections to a plan to build what one local councillor calls “a monster” food waste plant on Beddington Lane.
Monster proposal: the Suez food waste plant has received hundreds of objections, with a public meeting planned for Wednesday night
The Suez food waste plant proposals are to be the subject of a public meeting in Sutton tomorrow night.
The plans have already been made into a council byelection issue by independent residents’ candidate Pamela Marsh, ahead of polling day for Sutton Central on April 10.
As predicted, a planning application from Suez to build their new plant was submitted within days of misleading leaflets being distributed to at least 80,000 local homes in the borough with the false headline claim that there has been a “steep rise” in food waste recycling rates.
In fact, according to official council figures, food waste recycling in Sutton rose by a pathetic 0.55% in 2023-2024.
In neighbouring borough Kingston, food waste recycling rates fell in 2023-2024.
Independent councillor Nick Mattey has called this, “Sutton Council’s shameful and deceitful approach to waste and recycling.”
Council-backed lies: the dodgy leaflet
The leafleting campaign, conducted by rubbish contractors Veolia with pamphlets carrying a Sutton Council logo, insinuating that the local authority approves the message, “is part of the softening-up campaign to build a massive anaerobic digester in Beddington Lane, so all the members of the South London Waste Partnership can bring all their stinking food into Beddington”, Mattey said.
Hey presto, planning officials under Sutton’s £230,000 per year chief executive “Hapless Helen” Bailey, have duly recommended approval of the Suez plant, despite widespread and growing public objections. “They’re turning Beddington into the dumping ground of south London,” one local posted on social media.
Beddington Lane is, of course, already the site of the Viridor incinerator, burning the rubbish of at least four boroughs, including Croydon’s.
The incinerator was malfunctioning over the weekend, machinery at the plant making loud noises and attracting complaints from residents living more than a mile away.
“South London’s menace incinerator has been on bypass mode for over 48 hours,” according to Dave Tchil, one of Sutton’s two Labour councillors (the one that doesn’t live in Spain).
“Not only does it still produce its polluting smoke, but it also now makes a deafening white noise all day and all night.
“You’d think it’s operators Viridor would be apologetic, or the South London Waste Partnership would put pressure on them to fess up, or the complicit Sutton Council would take action – nothing!”
Monster industrial plant: Suez’s own visualistion of the recycling plant that they want to develop on Beddington Lane, with the smoking chimneys of the misfiring Viridor incinerator visible in the background of this CGI
Having fixed the planning system to grant Viridor permission to poison the air across south London for 25 years, Sutton’s planners now want to wave through Suez’s proposals to build an anaerobic digestion facility on a disused site on Beddington Lane, not far from the borough boundary with Croydon.
Suez says its industrial plant “would provide reliable, renewable energy by generating gas… processing up to 100,000 tonnes of food waste a year”.
They fail to say where all that stinking, rotting food waste is going to be trucked in from in thousands of lorry journeys each week, because despite the council-backed propaganda leaflets, it seems that the four boroughs in the South London Waste Partnership – including Croydon – are not generating enough recycling to satisfy Suez’s “monster”.
- Tomorrow night’s (April 2) protest meeting is taking place at Sutton Civic Centre from 7pm
Read more: April Fools! £40m Veolia contract comes into force tomorrow
Read more: Nearly two-thirds of Croydon waste is going to the incinerator
Read more: BINMAGEDDON!: Veolia is sending recycling to incinerator
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Sutton residents shouldn’t be too bothered about a food waste plant next to the already fume-belching incinerator, because Beddington Lane is right on the edge of the borough of Sutton and the prevailing wind (from the South west) blows all the pollution, smells and noise over Thornton Heath and Norbury (in LB of Croydon) ?!
you beat me to it… its not Sutton residents that are suffering the pollution, stench and heavy traffic….