EMBATTLED campaigners who defeated plans for a £20m biological plant are facing a new fight just days later.

An anaerobic digester could now be built on Sutton Courtenay landfill site after councillors threw out plans for the biological plant there.

Waste Recycling Group (WRG) was refused permission to build the 26,800sq metre plant on the Sutton Courtenay landfill site on Monday, September 12.

But the company has announced it is now seeking to build an anaerobic digester on the site off the B4016.

The facility will create electricity from crops grown on site.

Campaigners say the company has submitted ten planning applications for the site in the past 12 years and said they were fed up with fighting planning applications.

Sutton Courtenay campaigner Dr Pauline Wilson said: “WRG are a dreadfully bad neighbour. They have no understanding of the impact on the community.

“We are absolutely sick to death of fighting the company. It is so exhausting continually having to respond to these idiots.”

Residents can see WRG’s plans at an exhibition today in Appleford village hall from 2.30pm to 8pm.

WRG’s application for the biological treatment plant, which was blocked by Oxfordshire County Council, came after the firm was denied permission to build a waste incinerator on the site.

Another Sutton Courtenay campaigner David McKenzie, 67, said: “They have been doing this sequentially for years now. Usually within a few days or weeks of getting one rejected they come out with another.

“It is a huge burden on use in the villages surrounding it having to put together teams to research all the different technologies every time.

“But our prime objection is this is a greenfield site. If they get an industrial building in that site they will follow it up with more and sooner or later the whole thing will be industrialised.

“This company just doesn’t stop.”

Gervase Duffield, Vale of White Horse District Council member for Sutton Courtenay and Appleford, said WRG had permission to use the landfill site up until 2030 but with recycling rates rising there might not be the need.

He added: “That is, of course, why they are so anxious to get something new.”

“People are fed up because they don’t trust them. Every time something is thrown out they come back with something else.”

The firm hopes to have the facility built and operational by next autumn.

WRG’s head of external affairs Mike Snell said: “The facility mainly comprises three grain silos each about 15 metres high – it will look very much like many agricultural landscapes with parts of the site used for growing the maize crop to feed the plant. No waste material is used in this process.

“Currently about half the landfill on the site is now restored and this is where the crop will grow. The other half continues to accept residual waste and will do so until it is full.”