I HAVE had a sneak preview of the form that will be sent to all households as part of the waste strategy consultation. It's available from York council's website.

Also available from this site is the 116-page Best Practicable Environmental Option Report. Luckily you do not have to read all 116 pages to spot the deliberate mistake: the report describes 11 options, ranked in terms of various grounds (eg financial cost, how much land will it take up, etc).

Some of the assumptions made in the rankings, such as lack of markets for certain forms of waste, will certainly no longer hold by the time the plan comes into action (2012 to 2020).

Of all the options, Option 1b, the only option involving "energy from waste" (that's "incinerator" to you and me), comes bottom on public health and public involvement grounds: the former because of dioxin emissions and the latter because if recycling is as successful as the council would like it to be, there won't be enough "fuel" to make it a going concern.

And which of these 11 options are the two that appear in the "consultation" leaflet? Well, they're two slightly-different versions of...Option 1b!

Given that the people of York are now reducing our landfill contributions so effectively, do we really deserve such rubbish treatment?

Candida Spillard,

Seymour Grove,

Heworth,

York.

Updated: 10:19 Friday, December 02, 2005