And, the company’s director, Andrew Beck, has also said he hopes work will start on a waste wood biomass plant in “the next few months”.
Mr Beck, who heads up the biomass business, has hit out at critics who claim Navitas, which took on the Appspond Lane site near St Albans in late 2013, has not done enough to hasten removal of the three-year old heap.
Around 15,000 tonnes of waste wood was left when previous site owner Wood Recycling Services Ltd closed its doors following a large fire in November 2012.
Navitas has a permit to build a biomass plant on the site to process 86,000 tonnes of waste wood from around Hertfordshire. It initially exported around 5,000 tonnes of the existing wood pile to Germany before the outlet stopped taking the material.
The Environment Agency then refused to issue a second temporary licence to allow Navitas to process the wood on site.
MP
The local MP Anne Main has kept up pressure on the company over Appspond Lane, partly because of two fires in 2015. And, she has questioned why the Environment Agency has not stepped in to enforce Navitas to clear the site.
But speaking to letsrecycle.com today, Mr Beck said the company is “working very closely” with the Environment Agency and argued Mrs Main had “not once” agreed to meet with him to discuss the issue.
He said: “Mrs Main has lots to say on the matter but I’ve never got any response from her office. We are not the cause. We didn’t put the pile of wood there in the first place, it’s something we have inherited. We are in the final stages of securing the finance to start building the [biomass] plant but we need to clear the site before we do it.”
Fire
Commenting on the two recent fire incidents, Mr Beck explained that the September blaze was due to “a build-up of heat” and said the fire brigade had been there in an “advisory capacity”.
The earlier incident in July 2015 was an “arson attack” in which the perpetrators broke into the site in the early hours of the morning. No charges have yet been brought.
Mr Beck also denied claims made by Mrs Main’s office that the outlet in Germany had stopped taking the wood because “it was deemed not good enough to recycle”. He argued that a “technical problem” in Germany had meant the buying site was unable to accept the material.
Wood
Asked about Navitas’ plans for removing the remainder of the wood, Mr Beck added he “did not want to focus on the past”.
He said: “It costs £500,000 to move that wood. No one just comes in and raises half a million pounds. But now we have secured the money to build the plant, which also includes the money to clear it. It will probably go off to licensed sites across the country.”
On construction of the firm’s biomass plant, he said: “It will produce 15MW of electricity and solve some of the waste problems around the area. We expect to begin building in the next few months.”
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