IT WAS with great disappointment that I read Coun Joe Watt’s comments on the Allerton Incinerator which, with some stretch of the English language, he calls an “energy from waste” plant (Letters, July 29).

Coun Watt asks: “Are emissions an issue? No; noxins and toxins are removed by a combination of combustion temperatures and filtration.”

Incinerators, by their very nature, burn things. Burning things made out of carbon releases CO2 and contributes to climate change.

Coun Watt’s reference to “noxins and toxins” is literally and metaphorically a smokescreen.

He has said nothing about CO2, and yet claims that emissions are not an issue. Clean incineration is an oxymoron.

Perhaps even more seriously, this costly incinerator ties York into producing the same level of waste for 25 years, thus penalising the council for improving its recycling rates.

The contract assumes that York will achieve a 50 per cent recycling rate during the next 25 years; York is already at 43 per cent, while South Oxfordshire is at 70 per cent.

Think of all the changes that have happened in the past 25 years. Is improving York’s recycling rate by more than seven per cent over 25 years really that unrealistic? I think not.

Owen Clayton, Walmgate, York.