Save Honey Hill campaigners fear ‘huge’ carbon cost of moving Cambridge sewage works
Campaigners against plans to move Cambridge’s sewage works to a green belt beauty spot have raised concerns about the carbon cost of the project.
The Save Honey Hill group is “extremely disappointed” that neither Anglian Water nor Cambridge City Council have yet provided information about the carbon cost of shifting the Cambridge Waste Water Treatment Plant less than a mile to arable farmland between the villages of Horningsea, Fen Ditton and Quy.
As Anglian Water prepares to resubmit its Development Consent Order application to the Planning Inspectorate, the local campaign group, which is fighting to stop the relocation, said: “What should be the number one topic on everyone’s minds has so far been ignored or glazed over, or to coin a phrase ‘greenwashed’.”
A spokesperson for the group added: “We are really concerned that there are huge carbon costs associated with moving Cambridge’s sewage works to Honey Hill, not least having to build the necessary transfer tunnel between the two sites. The mind boggles as to the figures for the construction of the actual plant itself. Then there is the decommissioning of the old waste water treatment plant site in Milton to take into account. With the enormous amount of carbon this will release into the atmosphere, how will that measure up against the environmental goals of Cambridge City Council and Anglian Water?
“Who is going to accept responsibility for this carbon they will be releasing as a result of moving the sewage works, especially when there is no operational need to move the works? We have not seen any figures for this or any sign of the carbon impact of the project being taken into account. It doesn’t matter if Anglian Water’s new plant will be operationally net zero and new houses will be built near a train station, if you produce massive amounts of CO2 to achieve it. We’re being faced with a congestion charge to reduce carbon emissions but still don’t know the impact of this project”
The relocation of the waste water treatment plant will enable the council to fulfil its ambition to develop a new low-carbon district on the city’s last major brownfield site, located in North East Cambridge.
There has been a three-stage public consultation, which started in 2020 after funding was allocated to Anglian Water and the council by the government’s Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) towards the relocation of the plant.
The new district could eventually provide 8,350 homes and 15,000 new jobs.
However, Anglian Water has admitted there is no operational need to move the sewage works at Milton, which were recently updated.
A spokesperson for the water company said it was “working with the master developers of the existing Cambridge Waste Water Treatment Plant (WWTP) to help them understand what assets and infrastructure will remain in place”.
The environmental statement that it provides to the Planning Inspectorate “will include an assessment of the construction of the proposed WWTP (embedded carbon in materials), land use change (the net impact of land permanently required for the proposed development), operation of the proposed WWTP and decommissioning of the existing Cambridge WWTP.”
However, the company added: “The carbon of the existing Cambridge WWTP is not part of the scope of this proposal. That work will be completed by the future developer and considered as part of a separate planning application. It is likely to include the effects of emissions from plants used in demolition and the offset associated with the reuse of materials, including secondary aggregate, recovered steel and equipment.”
This would leave the developer of the Cowley Road site upon which the city council intends to build the new district to account for the carbon cost of decommissioning the old sewage works.
Anglian Water said: “Regarding the relative whole-life carbon impact of the proposed development and the opportunity it presents for regeneration of (North East Cambridge) against the alternative of leaving the existing WWTP in situ (a question raised by a number of parties in the consultation process prior to submission of the DCO application), Anglian Water has undertaken a high level strategic whole-life carbon assessment to compare the proposed relocation of the Cambridge Waste Water Treatment works with a plausible and reasonable counterfactual (alternative) scenario. This will also be included in the DCO application.”
Meanwhile, the city council said that as development of the Cowley Road sewage works site in Milton “would probably take place over a period of circa 20 years” it meant that “the carbon assessment for the long-term development is currently at an early stage”.
