Ford recycling plant gets go-ahead

The move shows a massive U-turn by the county council, which refused planning permission for the development in February.

Despite objections from Arun District Council and eight parish and town councils on the impact of the new site, the plan was approved at a meeting of the county council's planning committee on Tuesday.

The Materials Recovery Facility (MRF), the only one of its kind in Sussex, will be run by Viridor, the county council's waste management partner.

It is designed to process up to 100,000 tonnes of cans, plastic and paper waste each year from all over the county.

The facility does not actually recycle these materials but separates them into various grades of each plastic and paper to be sent off and sold for recycling, possibly in the UK but most likely abroad.

Once built, the MRF is expected to process around 54,000 tonnes of waste a year by 2008 and 95,000 tonnes by 2017.

The site at Ford was deemed the best choice of location for reducing vehicle trips to and from it.

The county council tried to allay fears of a dramatic rise in the amount of traffic on the roads and stated that any rise was expected to be less than one per cent.

A computer-generated traffic model predicted that traffic in Littlehampton would increase by 0.08 per cent and 0.827 per cent at Lyminster.

Viridor said it would make improvements to the roads to help them cope with the increase in traffic.

A spokeswoman for Viridor, Lyn Worsley, said: "We are aware that the public have concerns about an increase in traffic from the facility.

"We have agreed in our planning regulations that lorries using the site can only use certain roads and we will work to reduce speeds down those roads by narrowing them."

Mrs Worsley also said that as the site develops over the next 10 years there may also be scope to build an anaerobic composter to deal with green waste there as well.