Sir – David Cameron has said “We have to think globally and act locally . . . Conservative councils are bringing innovation and imagination to the challenges of tackling climate change at local government level . . . and I’m encouraging our councillors to do everything they can to advance the green agenda,” (Norwich Evening News, April 9, 2006). Apparently not in Oxfordshire. Despite being a local MP, Mr Cameron has refused to tell the public his views on incinerators here, stating it is up to local authorities.

The Conservative cabinet’s approach at the county council has been precisely to refuse to consider innovative and imaginative alternatives to the rapidly ageing technology of incineration. Many who have studied the issues closely, including MP Ed Vaizey and Friends of the Earth’s Andy Wood, quoted in Reg Little’s article (May 7), indicate that OCC’s approach to waste management, far from advancing the green agenda, is stepping backwards because it has refused to consider more flexible alternatives which would use recycling and/or see waste as a resource to create gas substitute. OCC prefers to send rubbish up in smoke, generating unusable heat and far worse, carbon dioxide.

OCC and WRG replicate statements about numbers of European incinerators, ignoring the fact that, for example, France is backpedalling and, further afield, so is the USA, while Japan is going for plasma gasification; and why does WRG build alternatives in its home country, Spain?

The Conservative Party leader has not yet persuaded his local councillors to be innovative, and imaginative, perhaps because they prefer to listen to the minority incineration lobby.

Come on Dave let’s really hear it from you in Oxfordshire on the green agenda. There is an election coming, give us an alternative worth voting for, rather than the old-fashioned technology that is incineration.

Pauline Amos-Wilson, Sutton Courtenay