20/04/06   Nottingham Evening Post 'Incinerator Bosses face legal action after shutdown'

The city council is preparing to sue the owners of Nottingham's incinerator.

Eastcroft incinerator, in London Road, was shut down for almost half of last year after asbestos was discovered in the plant during what should have been a 13-week closure for planned maintenance.

Waste firm WRG, which owns the incinerator, has admitted that further technical problems there have meant it has not been operating at "100% efficiency" recently.

The Evening Post revealed in December that the city council was considering claiming for compensation for losses incurred due to the plant's problems.

Now officials have confirmed they are pressing ahead with legal action.

"We are preparing a legal action against WRG," said a council spokeswoman.

While the plant was closed, the council - which incinerates 80,000 tonnes of rubbish a year - had to send waste, which would normally have been burnt, to landfill sites.

Sending waste to landfill costs the council money.

It also loses out on grants for avoiding sending rubbish to tips.

Council officers are not revealing the amount of compensation attached to the claim. But the extra costs the authority has incurred are responsible for most of a £1m-plus overspend on the council's waste management budget.

A WRG spokesman said technical problems affecting one of two processing lines at the incinerator meant parts of the plant had not been working recently.

This had been a problem for weeks, rather than months.

"There are no environmental issues attached to this," added the spokesman.

The city council has written to the company about the compensation claim.

But details of the amount the authority wanted and the periods of plant inactivity it was claiming over had not yet been given, said WRG's spokesman.