A NEW waste management plant could open in Newport, on a site which was once a battleground in a controversial scheme to build an incinerator in South Wales.

Plans have been submitted to Newport City Council which would see vacant brownfield land off West Way Road near to the docks brought into use.

If approved, the one hectare site would be turned into a waste management plant, complete with a workshop and offices.

Planning documents show that “The site would be divided into separate areas to allow the waste and recycling material to be brought to site and stored in enclosed compounds before being sorted and transferred in specific collection areas.”

The application has been submitted by LRJ Planning, who are acting as the agents on behalf of the applicant, Leah Butler.

How did we get here?

While the land, located a short distance away from the former Lidl supermarket on Docks Way, it has been subject to a fair amount of interest in recent years.

Most recently, planning permission was granted to allow neighbouring business Dainton Self Storage to expand onto the land.

The land was granted Class B8 status, which would have allowed storage containers to be built on the land.

But, for reasons which are not known, this option was never exercised, and the land remained empty.

Earlier still, the land was a footnote in a controversial development which spanned much of South Wales.

In 2011, plans were drawn up to build a huge incinerator in South Wales, as part of Prosiect Gwyrdd.

Set to be located in Merthyr Tydfil, it would burn 750,000 tonnes of non-recyclable waste a year and generate 77 megawatts of electricity.

But, as part of this plan, a number of waste transfer stations would need to be built, where  municipal, commercial and industrial waste would be unloaded at the transfer station, bulked, compacted and reloaded into enclosed containers for transport by rail to the incinerator.

The West Way Road site in Newport was selected as one such location, and planning permission was granted to achieve this.

But, faced with mounting opposition, Covanta Energy pulled out of the Merthyr incinerator, and once a second location at the former Llanwern Steelworks was refused at the planning stage, it all but killed the need to use this site.

What do new plans show?

Details as to who might be able to use the new proposed waste management site are a little vague at this time.

However, it appears as though it is more along the lines of a standard recycling drop-off facility, rather than a larger scale plan similar to those we saw a decade ago.

In any case, the main changes to the land in question would be the hardsurfacing of the entire area, for vehicle access, and the creation of a new building, for storage and site management.

But, according to the applicant, given that the surrounding area is industrial in nature, this is unlikely to have a negative impact, either visually or socially on any persons.

The planning application can be viewed and commented upon online here.