ouncil’s cabinet made a catastrophic decision to adopt a “technology neutral” strategy to waste disposal, recommended by their head of sustainable development, in November 2004.

The approved proposal was that desired levels of recovery and recycling would be specified, an “output based” approach, and the market would determine the best solution.

A decision based on output alone does not aspire to move up the waste hierarchy of ever-increasing reduction, reuse, and recycling, adopted by policy makers worldwide.

Oxford City Council commented on the proposal saying “we would like to express our desire to see waste reduction as a parallel approach”.

The Vale of White Horse District Council said “account must be taken of the waste hierarchy principle”.

Their warnings and questions of sustainability were ignored.

The problem with incineration when evaluated against the waste hierarchy, is that it removes the need to make further progress towards valuing waste as a resource.

If all residual waste can be burnt, there’s no incentive to reduce packaging, reuse containers through deposit schemes, increase recycling or compost organic waste.

Worse still, this remains the case for the 25 years of the incinerator contract, during which waste must be actively sought to be burnt.

Incineration is at the bottom of the waste pyramid and keeps you stuck there.

No Time to Waste, The Oxfordshire Joint Municipal Waste Management Strategy 2006, evaluated potential solutions using the best practice approach of “reduce, reuse, recycle”.

In an unforgivable omission, it failed to point out that the county council was not using the same, best practice, methodology.

By not considering the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social needs, the county council has ended up with the sub-optimal solution of incineration.

The Oxfordshire Joint Municipal Waste Management Strategy is to be reviewed in 2010.

This is a great opportunity to apply to Oxfordshire’s waste strategy the sustainability principles the rest of the world has already adopted.

John Whitworth, Oxford Court, Weston-on-the-Green