Concerns over plans for asphalt plant beside Allerton Park incinerator
It will be located off the A1(M) between York and Knaresborough.
Community leaders have voiced concerns over the further industrialisation of a rural area of North Yorkshire after a roadbuilding materials firm unveiled an ambition to create an asphalt plant beside a hugely controversial incinerator.
Tynedale Roadstone hopes to produce the roadbuilding material beside Allerton Park Waste Recovery Centre, off the A1(M) between York and Knaresborough, almost a decade after North Yorkshire County Council approved the £1.4bn energy from waste incinerator scheme amid uproar it would ruin the area.
Such was the opposition to the incinerator, which has since been dubbed a blot on the landscape by locals, that two MPs and protestors handed in a petition with 10,000 signatures at Downing Street.
Tynedale has submitted a request for a Environmental Impact Assessment Scoping Opinion alongside a pre-application advice request to the authority to seek agreement from the council on the principle of the proposed development and to set the scope of a forthcoming planning application.
Planning documents state Tynedale has various long-term supply agreements with surfacing and maintenance companies in Yorkshire, but its two asphalt plants are in Newcastle and County Durham.
They state another asphalt plant is needed on “vacant brownfield land” at Allerton Park partly for environmental reasons.
The papers state: “The extent of Tynedale Roadstone’s contracts in Yorkshire is such that a new asphalt facility is required to meet demand and ensure locally resourced product is within easy reach of key contract locations.
“The demand is established and continually fuelled by maintenance works requirements; an additional independent asphalt plant is needed to service it. Government and company policies on sustainability, carbon footprints, energy efficiency, transport networks, trafficking and haulage distances are some of the many drivers behind establishing another asphalt plant.”
The planning documents state the site has been identified as the best location to serve demand, as the nearest asphalt plants to the site are in Pateley Bridge and at Stourton, in Leeds.
As part of the site searching process alternative sites have been considered and discounted with this development site being chosen based it being beside the A1(M) and A59 junction.
Other factors in the site being selected included the availability of existing plastics from the waste recovery plant that can be reused within the end asphalt product, and its “immediate industrial surroundings”.
Councillor Arnold Warneken, whose Ouseburn division includes villages closest to the proposed plant, said the firm’s description of the site as brownfield was “absolute rubbish” and that increasing the number of heavy goods vehicles entering and leaving the site would be a cause of concern.
He said: “There will be very little support for this locally. It is a very rural location which has had a blister of a building put on it. The site has a waste plant next to it, but beyond that you’ve got prime agricultural land in a rural setting.
“The original purpose of the site for recycling and incineration has to be retained. Whilst it is good practice to put two industries that are complemented together, you have got to look at the impact of the vehicles that are coming onto that site.
“To get to the A1 the HGVs will have to use the A168 which has already got heavy traffic on it from the waste plant and a quarry, so it would add to an existing problem.”
“It’s an industrialised function which needs to be alongside true brownfield sites.”