Plans to develop a new incinerator in Cardiff have come under fire because of concerns it will not be limited to burning non-recyclable waste.

Waste firm Viridor has been selected as preferred partner by the owners of a site near the Cardiff docks to take forward the £150 million project to build a "waste management and resource recovery facility".

The partnership with PMG Estates Ltd - a property company owned by Paul Guy and former Welsh rugby international Mike Hall that is also involved in developing a new stadium for Cardiff City Football Club - has hopes to develop the facility at Trident Park to take waste from Cardiff city council.

If a contract is not agreed to take the city's waste, however, the facility could be developed as a merchant facility instead.

Local newspapers are yet to make up their minds over the project, with an editorial in the South Wales Echo this week concluding: "We must see all the facts before deciding whether this project offers a genuine long-term solution to our rubbish headaches."

But with the plant being designed to process as much as 500,000 tonnes of material each year, pressure group Friends of the Earth Cymru has expressed concerns that will not be filled with only non-recyclable waste, and that it could be used to process waste from across South Wales and even England.

"State-of-the-art"

Announcing its selection as preferred partner with PMG last week, Viridor said the "state-of-the-art" facility would help divert waste from landfill in an area where "sites used for landfill are close to running out."

The company said it planned to use the plant to provide a "substantial amount of electricity" for Cardiff, and that it could also generate heat for the surrounding businesses in Trident Park.

The site itself already has an Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) licence because it previously housed a blast furnace run by Nippon Glass. Viridor said there were no residential properties nearby and that Trident Park is close to an existing landfill site, meaning site traffic would not need to be redirected to a different part of the city.

Over the coming months Viridor is to meet with key stakeholders and the local community to outline its plans, "providing a forum for discussion and ensuring the public is part of the process and able to contribute at every step".

The company's external affairs manager Dan Cooke said: "This site could greatly assist Cardiff in meeting the significant challenges involved in moving to more sustainable methods of managing waste as a resource and recovering value while continuing to maximise recycling levels. We are looking forward to having detailed discussions in the near future with key stakeholders to take the proposals forward."

"Waste guzzling monster"

Friends of the Earth Cymru has come out against the plans for the Cardiff incinerator, warning that it is "likely to end up burning waste from across South Wales, and may need to import waste from England".

The pressure group also questions the developers' claims that the plant will process "non-recyclable" waste.

Julian Rosser, director of FoE Cymru, said: "Incineration is not the best way of dealing with waste: it means burning paper and plastics that should be recycled. It's not a renewable way of generating energy because so much of the 'fuel' comes from plastics which are made from oil.

"The incinerator's demand for thousands of tonnes of waste would discourage Welsh councils from investing properly in recycling. A waste guzzling monster like this would tie us into burning lots of our rubbish for a generation. We need to be reducing the amount of waste we produce, and recycle and compost anything left," Mr Rosser added.