"Sita have already made their profit from Bristol for treating the waste, they have already made a profit from selling the gas and the diesel from the Avonmouth plant, and now they want to make a profit from us for disposing of the left overs in a plant paid for by Cornish tax payers."

Last week, I was pleased to be invited to participate in ITV’s “The West Country at Westminster” alongside the Labour MP for Bristol East, Kerry McCarthy, and the Conservative MP for Plymouth Moor View, Johnny Mercer.

"One of the green modern industries that Cornwall could become famous for is the recycling of plastics. This will be a truly sustainable industry, keep rubbish out of the Cornish countryside and allow Cornish food manufacturers to brag about how green their products AND packaging are."

Have you seen the white elephant taking shape near St. Dennis? Everybody knows that there will not be enough waste to run the Incinerator (all except Cornwall Council).

I always wonder why various parts of Government and Local Government are never joined up. Offices full of reasonable and hard working people investigating and planning how to do things efficiently, and then up the other end of the corridor another group working on a contradictory scheme with equal ardour.

“He grew rich as a dust contractor” – Charles Dickens, 'Our mutual friend' 1865. “If the Government filled old bottles with bank notes then buried them deep in the ground with town rubbish piled over the top and sold leases to dig the bottles up, there would be no unemployment and people would find a use for the rubbish to prevent having to dig through it to get at the money” – John Maynard Keynes, 1936.

What are the priorities between the collection and disposal of food waste on the one hand and wood waste on the other? How will this damage Cornwall?

The recycling policy currently practiced by Cornwall Council is to outsource it as part of the Sita Waste Contract. This means that Cory collect the waste and recycling on behalf of the Council, and the Council then pass the material to Sita and pay them a “gate fee” per tonne. Sita then sell the recycling on the open market and keep the profit. Thus Sita benefit twice from the same recycling.

Hardly anything except perhaps mobile phone technology, has moved as fast as methods for dealing with waste. Technology that was state of the art five years ago is now totally out of date. The reasons for this are firstly that we have become seriously aware of what will happen to the planet if we keep plundering the finite resources, coupled with the effect that waste emissions have on the atmosphere. Secondly the discovery that waste is worth a lot of money.