Complaints over waste site’s ‘nauseating smell’

11:00am Saturday 11th August 2012 in News

VILLAGERS yesterday complained after waking up to a “nauseating smell” coming from a nearby waste site.

FCC Environment, which runs the Sutton Courtenay landfill site, said it identified the compost odour in the Harwell Road area of the village in the morning and stopped its operations.

But villager Pauline Wilson said: “Residents have woken up to a nauseating smell, which permeates houses.

“Unfortunately this is a common occurrence, which the company does not seem at all interested in addressing.”

The Environment Agency received 10 calls from residents complaining of the smell. It sent out inspectors, but by 10.30am FCC Environment had dealt with the problem.

An Environment Agency spokesman said: “We are going to work with them to try to make it not happen again.”

Mike Snell, head of external affairs at FCC, said: “We have made significant investments to odour control systems.

“In the last year at our Sutton Courtenay site we have installed a full perimeter odour neutralising system and made other operational improvements.”

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Comments(11)

to ny w says...
11:20am Sat 11 Aug 12

Pop up to Ardley and get a wiff of Agrivert as well. Soon all the county will be stinking.Plus Incinerators!!

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shipscat says...
6:34pm Sat 11 Aug 12

Unfortunately this is one of the by products of civilisation we would soon moan if the waste was not collected

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Megs says...
7:00pm Sat 11 Aug 12

The issue, shipscat, is not whether waste has to be dumped and/or treated, but where it is dumped. Nowadays, current regulations would not allow the operation at Sutton Courtenay, that causes so much stink, to be located so close to communities. Although too late for Sutton Courtenay this is progress and should mean that others do not have to cope with this environmental problem. It is heartening that the EA will work with FCC to ensure this problem does not happen again, becausecurrently it is very frequent. Clearly though, if nothing can be done, then relocation of the operation away from populations would seem to be the obvious solution.

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Whopper w/o Pickle Cornmarket St says...
2:28am Sun 12 Aug 12

Megs wrote:
The issue, shipscat, is not whether waste has to be dumped and/or treated, but where it is dumped. Nowadays, current regulations would not allow the operation at Sutton Courtenay, that causes so much stink, to be located so close to communities. Although too late for Sutton Courtenay this is progress and should mean that others do not have to cope with this environmental problem. It is heartening that the EA will work with FCC to ensure this problem does not happen again, becausecurrently it is very frequent. Clearly though, if nothing can be done, then relocation of the operation away from populations would seem to be the obvious solution.
What world do you live in Megs. Not close to communities, do you not realise that in a few years with current birth rates and mass immigration, that everywhere will be close to a community, or are we all going to live on the moon.

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Megs says...
8:37am Sun 12 Aug 12

Overall the UK is not as densely populated as it could be, so no need for you Whopperw/opickle to move to the moon just yet. In general, new generations are moving into cities so an obvious way forward would be to develop these - high rise in Cornmarket perhaps and, since you think it impossible for waste sites to be located away from communities, a town midden in Bonn Square, close to where the rubbish is generated?

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Whopper w/o Pickle Cornmarket St says...
8:50pm Sun 12 Aug 12

Megs wrote:
Overall the UK is not as densely populated as it could be, so no need for you Whopperw/opickle to move to the moon just yet. In general, new generations are moving into cities so an obvious way forward would be to develop these - high rise in Cornmarket perhaps and, since you think it impossible for waste sites to be located away from communities, a town midden in Bonn Square, close to where the rubbish is generated?
Judging by the types you see in Bonn Sq and the proximity to County Hall, I would agree that this is a most appropriate for it. But the NIMBY known as Hudspeth will not have it in his own office backyard.

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hp1 says...
9:37pm Sun 12 Aug 12

Funny that whenever I have contacted the EA about the stink, they profess to know nothing about it.

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Megs says...
7:49am Mon 13 Aug 12

hp1, sorry to hear of this lack of response. Try 0800807060. This has always worked for my neighbours & me. We usually get a call back from the duty environmental officer and they sometimes visit residents as well as the site.On the day in question above, they took a while to answer - because of the volume of calls!

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Myron Blatz says...
12:19pm Mon 13 Aug 12

Waste management - perhaps the ultimate 'Catch 22' hot potatoe? Local and County Councils in Oxfordshire want everyone to recycle and be 'more responsible citizens' whilst eco-groups and political parties keep preaching the recycling ethic. Yet nobody seems to want legal rubbish dumps, landfill sites, recycling plants or refuse incinerators in their locality, to deal with the rubbish which they create. Its not that long ago that recycled waste from Oxfordshire was shipped abroad to places like China as profit-making 'waste resource transfer' - maybe the ultimate in nimby-ism? Be interesting to see how Oxford City Council deals with the additional waste disposal and recycling demand from the 1,000-plus homes (and 2,000-3,000 actual people?) which the planned Barton expansion will create.

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Megs says...
4:29pm Mon 13 Aug 12

Myron Blatz, very good points. Waste should be dealt with as near to it's source as possible - the proximity principle. Large treatment sites, although providing economies of scale & maximising profits for the operators, aren't good for people. In Sutton Courtenay and neighbouring communities we get the gift of several hundreds of thousands of tonnes of London's waste (as well as more local - Oxon & Berks) and Ardley will have the imposition of an incinerator to deal with all of Oxfordshire's non-recyclables. When you think about it, Oxford must produce the greatest concentration of rubbish (waste I mean, nothing to do with academic output) yet no one proposes an incinerator or waste recycling "campuses" on the scale required to deal with it there. The frequent solution in the UK seems to be just chuck or burn it outside the city limits - out of sight, out of mind .

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Victor's_friend says...
8:50am Wed 15 Aug 12

Apparently there are artic trucks carrying human poo etc that go through Grove on A338 and west of Wantage on A417. The stench after it passes wafts for ages and makes you retch you can't imagine. What must have been eaten?

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