Protest and the environment

The spectacle of people in badger costumes miming outside the Assembly yesterday in protest at the forthcoming cull is something which you can either sneer at or empathise with depending on your disposition – but protest, in whatever guise, is something long associated with the environmental lobby.

So you have to wonder at their absence during residents protests at the resumption of landfill tipping at Tir John on the eastern outskirts of Swansea.

Friends of the Earth Cymru claim a link exists between landfill activities and birth defects. They list the Tir John operation as a ‘landfill site of concern’ but did not apparently make a peep when tipping started up again. Perhaps the local paper did not contact them for a comment but since when is that an excuse?

The city boasts a long established, well-staffed & independently run Environment Centre but the prospect of household refuse getting dumped next door to a special conservation area does not merit a mention on their sustainable website.

Swansea councillors who voted overwhelmingly in March 2009 to reject plans for a biomass facility at Kings Dock half a mile away did not raise a murmur the following September at the prospect of refuse trucks returning to Port Tennant. As it happens, Swansea Friends of the Earth objected to that same application and expressed concern about the “effect of nitrogen deposition on Crymlyn Bog which is listed as a special area of conservation under the European Habitats Directive”. As mentioned, Tir John landfill is directly alongside the same protected site yet no concerns were heard from the FoE – although they do seem animated about tipping in a quarry elsewhere in the city.

Given these facts, it is questionable as to just how well Swansea is being served by politicians and environmentalists who seem to hold such strong views about biomass plants (and badger culls) yet do not question a cabinet decision to re-open a landfill site – or at least challenge the rationale involved.

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(PLR)