A £17 MILLION incinerator is to be built in Hampshire to burn hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cattle infected with mad cow disease.

Based near Southampton Water, the incinerator will dispose of more than 1,000 tonnes of flesh and bonemeal every week for the next three years.

It is a massive increase on the amount of carcasses already being burnt under contract in the area, and the size of the planned operation has led to local calls for careful monitoring of air quality.

Waste disposal group Shanks, which took over the former Rechem incinerator at Fawley, has won a contract to burn 190,000 tonnes of animal remains which built up during the BSE ''mad cows'' crisis.

The firm's existing three-year contract to burn up to 45,000 tonnes of infected cattle ends in March.

Shanks today confirmed it will be building a new incinerator between Fawley and Hythe over the next few months to handle the new multi-million pound contract, awarded by the government's Intervention Board.

Shanks spokesman John Shaughnessy said: "Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of MBM meat and bonemeal built up in barns all over the country during the crisis and the government has awarded three contracts, one of them to ourselves, to try to clear the backlog."

The planned incinerator, which he pointed out already has permission under Shanks's general development order, will be smaller than the existing burner built by Rechem.

"It is a very compact piece of kit designed to work ultra-efficiently for this type of material and it will share the same chimney stack as our existing burner,'' he said.

The new incinerator will have the added benefit of generating eight megawatts of electricity and negotiations are already under way between Shanks and a number of potential customers, added Mr Shaughnessy. "It is our aim that the impact on the area will be kept to a minimum," he said.

He added that it is likely to generate an additional eight to ten lorryloads of materials per day.

Shanks' divisional managing director Colin Brown said: "We have been processing MBM at our Fawley plant for nearly three years now and during that time we have destroyed well over 30,000 tonnes without any problems."

But in the wake of the new contract award, Dibden and Hythe's Hampshire county councillor Brian Dash called for extremely thorough monitoring of the increased burning.

"The vital issue here is the thoroughness and care in the monitoring of the emissions through the trial stage and, indeed, to ensure that the most robust monitoring continues.

"It is vital that the environment of people living locally is safeguarded.

"No one would choose to have a disposal plant like that next door to them, but it is there and we have to ensure that it is not detrimental to the environment of people" he said.

The increased activity came under fire from Southampton's Communities Against Toxics group.

Spokesman Giulia Gigliotti said: "We have always felt that burning this waste was not the most advantageous way of disposing of this material and there is no guarantee that it will destroy the things that caused BSE in the first place.

"This is just an escalation of something that was wrong from the start."

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