The Chelson Meadow landfill site in Plymouth is going to be shut down on Monday after being in existence for over forty years. This will be on the thirty first of March when the final lorry will dump waste into the ground at Chelson Meadow landfill site.
Consequently Plymouth will engage in a search for alternative ways of getting rid of rubbish in conjunction with Torbay Council and Devon County Council and they are likely to invest in a facility that turns waste into energy.
In the meantime the rubbish will now be disposed off by Viridor Waste Management at its commercial landfill site, a distance of twenty kilometres from Plymouth on the western side. This is because the company won the bid to offer domestic waste management services for the city for a period of seven years. The service will be more expensive for the council since it will be paying commercial rates.
Councillor Michael Leaves, the cabinet member for street scene and environmental regulation in Plymouth pointed out the ignorance that was prevalent when Chelson was first used as a landfill site as the reason it was allowed to exist in the first place. He now urged everyone to recycle more and help save the council taxes it was bound to incur from the landfill taxes.
Currently Plymouth residents recycle and compost a little over thirty per cent of their household waste compared to their neighbours in Devon Council who recycle over half of their domestic waste. To turn around the situation Plymouth Council is planning to submit an Outline Business Case to Defra in a bid to get PFI funding.
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