PLANS for a major waste incinerator at Sharpness would choke communities a scant few miles away across the River Severn, say concerned residents.

Sharpness has emerged as the most likely of six sites which county council planners have identified in their Draft Waste Plan for Gloucestershire.

Planners say a new incinerator is necessary because it cannot meet Government targets for recycling and reducing landfill. The new facility would burn up to 400,000 tons of rubbish a year and generate electricity for the National Grid.

And although such facilities have been condemned for their levels of pollution in the past, the planners claim modern incinerators are completely clean so far as emissions and residues are concerned.

But Forest residents including Hugh Griffiths of Lydney, who earlier this year aired the view in the Review that pollutants from as far away as Avonmouth were harming the health of local people, say the technology is untried.

"It is crisis management again really," he said. He thought more effort was needed trying to reduce waste.

The residents of Newnham, Broadoak and Westbury would suffer most if the incinerator was built.

Of the six possible sites three are near Gloucester and two near Cheltenham – but the plan sees Sharpness as the most "environmentally sustainable" because of its canal, river, and railway access and because it would be on former industrial land in an area desperate for new jobs and investment.

Environment groups are also attacking the incinerator plans. They say pollutants such as deadly dioxins are released in the atmosphere. The ones which do not are still poisonous when reduced to ash and then have to go to landfill sites.

The only sustainable forms of waste management are composting and recycling, they say.

Lydney and Cinderford are also identified in the plan as sites for waste management facilities.

Areas of Lydney's Canal Works and Lydney Industrial Estate and Cinderford's Forest Vale Industrial Estate could be used as recycling and composting centres and waste transfer depots, the plan states.

Copies of the plan are available at Shire Hall in Gloucester and the Forest of Dean District Council's Coleford offices, or on http://www.gloscc.gov.uk">www.gloscc.gov.uk.