Vinery neighbour threatening legal action over wood burner
Monday 10th December 2012, 10:00AM GMT.
Director of environmental health and pollution regulation Val Cameron
A NEIGHBOUR of a Castel vinery has threatened to seek legal involvement after it has again been allowed to operate an industrial wood-fired boiler.
Helen Litchfield said she would be contacting the Law Officers after a new licence was granted to Whispers Vinery in Rue des Goddards, despite concerns from residents about fumes and noise.
The vinery installed the Schmid Biomass boiler in February last year, but it was shut down four months later following complaints.
At the weekend the director of environmental health and pollution regulation Val Cameron announced that she had granted a new licence to owners B. R. Langlois and Sons Ltd after the boiler had passed various independent tests.
Ms Litchfield, who has written a blog about the burner, raised serious concerns before the meeting about the lack of information or transparency by Environmental Health.
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Get a grip !!!!!!!!!!!!
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Good on you, Helen. We have only one set of lungs and looking after them is the very best health strategy we can follow, i.e. no smoking fires ( including campsites), no smoking cigarettes/cigars etc, expand the electric car market, and so on and so forth – ask anyone who is in hospital dying of lung desease……
Best regards and keep at it
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“expand the electric car market” Great idea, the most unfriendly idea for the environment ever conceived.
The pollution is just moved from the road to the power station, and worse still there are more losses involved in creating and distrubuting electricity.
Add to that how they are going to recycle electric cars at the end of there life ? The batteries alone will end up in landfill thanks to the illinformed green movement.
Car manufacturers love the green movement, it is just an excuse to sell more and more new cars. The greenest car is the one that lasts the longest, as anyone with an ounce of intelligence knows the cars enviromental damage is caused in its manufacture, its exhaust emissions are tiny in comparisson to the emissions caused in its manufacture.
Wake up green people, and do something for the environment, You should look at whose side you are on, it is certainly not on the side of the environment.
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Shows what a peaceful place Guernsey is,and long may it remain so.Letters are going to be sent
In some parts of the UK there wouldn’t be a pane of glass left in that vinery by now
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So, what would Mrs Litchfield prefer her neighbour heats his vinery with? I’m sure that oil fumes are more harmful (and smelly) than a bit of woodsmoke. Or, god forbid, back to the good old days when vineries burnt coke. Now that really would be a nuisance and a health hazard.
Knowing what an eager beaver Val Cameron is, I expect the tests this boiler has passed are pretty stringent, so there can’t be much harm or nuisance from it.
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If it was biomass wood fuel (which this boiler is designed to burn) I would agree with you (post at 11.28pm Dec 10th). It would be better than burning oil. But it isn’t biomass fuel. There will be a supply of old contaminated wood from pallets and construction demolition. Recall Island Waste was previously banned from burning this on open land at Pointes Lane when neighbours there complained. The States landfill site at Mont Cuet is where this waste was disposed of (until now). The only upside is that the States’ operated landfill site will have 1000 tonnes of contaminated waste diverted from it and this will ease the pressure on the site which is getting near to being full. But this is at the cost of polluting the air at Vazon Bay!
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Hey and guess where all the woodchip comes from, yes I am told it comes by the lorry load from the Isand Waste Site in Pointes Lane, and its not clean wood, every bit of crap thats gets dumped in skips, building site whatever, so dont try to tell me that there is no contamination in that. Shame on the authorities
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…and with respect to your comment about the “eager beaver”, any commercial stack emission monitoring organisation performing monitoring for regulatory purposes must be accredited by UKAS to ISO 17025. The “eager beaver” and her “pups” have all refused to provide evidence of such accreditation and we should “take her word”. Although you are correct in suggesting that the tests should be stringent (that’s why you have to use an independently accredited organisation). The original licence application had flue gas analysis performed by a company called “Cletheroe and Lockwood”, but they are not listed on the UKAS website (and even they reported levels of arsenic). The beaver has also been less than eager to even answer sensible questions, even ones put in writing, about the governance arrangements around the licencing of a “prescribed operation” for waste disposal by incineration.
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If that vinery is growing some sort of food then it must be one of very very few left in Guernsey. There used to be hundreds, at first belching smoke, than later using smokeless fuel such as anthracite and oil
Money manipulation feeds the population now but what if all the banks should fail or pull out? You could eat your savings for a while, I suppose, after that you’ll need to grow food in order to have the strength to cough.
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Woodsmoke, even clean wood, is highly carcinogenic. The wood they are burning is contaminated. We know this because Mrs Cameron has told us so. She said ” the plant will burn a range of mixed waste wood, not just that contaminated with chromium, copper and arsenic, so I will be requiring all chemical pollutants associated with the burning of waste wood to be managed properly eg. Lead, formaldehydes, oxides of carbon, oxides of nitrogen to name but a few. What does their licence application say about how these are to be controlled. Absolutely NOTHING!
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The licence was issued the very same day (7th Dec) as the application (which is required to be available for public inspection and a consultation period under the Waste Incineration Directive)
The licence was granted before the licence conditions were met.
…and perhaps worst of all, the Director met with concerned members of the public with their elected representatives and in the presence of the Press on 8th Dec and misled about the existence of the licence to operate this Waste Disposal plant.
But this is not the first time that she has misled about this matter, is it?
Some examples;
“I will make sure it is WID compliant” – Not correct
“I will have an electrostatic precipitator fitted” – Not correct
“I will make sure that continuous emissions monitoring equipment is fitted to automatically shut down the plant” – Not correct
“The company who measured the flue emissions for obnoxious content are fully accredited” – Not correct
The Director has therefore failed in their duty to be open and transparent and is in breach of the “The Environmental Pollution (Guernsey) Law, 2004″
Extract from that Law at 6.(2):
“The Director shall carry out his functions with fairness, impartiality and independence and in a manner that is timely, transparent, objective and consistent with States’ Directions and the provisions of this Law and any other enactment.”
It seems that on Guernsey, The Director of Environmental Health is above the Law, particularly the Pollution Law which states that no pollution is allowed unless it is “in the interests of the community” and even then, “best available technique” must be employed to minimise risk to Human Health.
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It is a requirement of the The Environmental Pollution (Guernsey) Law, 2004 (see clause 16 (1)) that all licences have to have a condition that best available technique is employed to reduce pollutants to a minimum. In this case, that means that the plant shall comply with the EU Waste Incineration Directive 2000. As the licence does not impose this condition, it is likely to be in breach of that Law.
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On a slightly different (but not totally unrelated) tack I wonder how long it will be until we’re not allowed to have open fires in our homes.
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Currently private homes are still allowed to emit smoke from furnaces and boilers. Extract from The Environmental Pollution (Guernsey) Law, 2004:
“51 (1) The States may by Ordinance provide that no furnace or boiler shall be installed on any premises other than a dwelling house unless it is so far as practicable capable of being operated continuously without emitting smoke when burning fuel of a type for which it is designed”
But of course, nobody would even think of burning old pallets and bits of old painted or treated wood in their sitting room fireplaces.
Meanwhile dangerous fumes are being emitted right next to private homes in Vazon Bay and with the agreement of Val Cameron who has not explicitly included the licence condition that “best available technique” should be employed to minimise pollution.
Shame on her.
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Ooh here they all come… lets get Europe firing up on gas and electric and away with these sustainable biomass users. Go back to Harvard with the stupid pro natural gas particulate matter nonsense. You can’t build a category of toxin out of a list of phantom risks. The public would have to be completely gullible to accept this Clean Air Act propaganda science.
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