A bigger and better waste transfer and household recycling centre to replace that in Shaftesbury Lane, Blandford, has finally been approved by Dorset Council planners after 10 years in the planning.
The new centre, costing £12.8m and similar to the award-winning facility built at Bridport, will be sited just off the Blandford bypass east of Sunrise Business Park, and served by a new access road off the bypass.
Work is now expected to start this summer, after the full archaeological excavation of an area where preliminary investigations revealed Roman burials and Iron Age deposits. The centre is due to be completed in the autumn of 2023.
The site was allocated after a thorough examination, which considered and ruled out other locations prior to the adoption in 2019 of the Bournemouth, Christchurch, Poole and Dorset Waste Plan.
The existing Shaftesbury Lane centre has long been considered too small, resulting in queues of waste vehicles waiting in Shaftesbury Lane to offload, temporary closures for waste to be transferred and members of the public having to climb steps to deposit waste and recycling.
The new centre will include a covered waste transfer station, with waste storage, sprinkler tank and pump house, and a split-level household recycling centre with vehicle unloading bays and partially covered central yard, a dedicated ‘re-use centre’, storage and office buildings, a staff parking area, weighbridge and landscaping including a substantial attenuation pond.
One of the key issues facing the designers was the location of the site, just inside the boundary of the Cranborne and West Wiltshire Area of Natural Beauty.
Richard Burden, principal landscaping and planning officer for the AONB, asked members of the council’s strategic planning committee whether there were enough exceptional circumstances and public interest to site the centre in one of the nation’s finest landscapes. He recognised that a reorientation of the layout had been a significant improvement, but the centre’s visibility within the AONB was still considerable.
Cllr Jennifer Morisetti, a trustee for Sustainable Dorset, pleaded with members to stop the disruption to the AONB and archaeological site and to instead repair and enhance existing sites.
Project sponsor Gemma Clinton said it was absolutely in the public interest, since the existing Shaftesbury Lane facility was insufficient, too small to allow the isolation of different waste streams for efficient management, and suffered from long queues.
Its replacement would, she said, improve the customer experience considerably, and allow them and the local authority to reduce, reuse and recycle more effectively.
Councillors raised no major objections to the scheme, but questioned the lack of pedestrian and cycle access for workers and other sustainability measures including solar panels and rainwater collection.
They were told that the design to mitigate the impact on the AONB meant that solar panels on the main building and other environmental features would not be cost-effective.
There is currently no safe means to cross the bypass on foot or bicycle, but there would be when the Wyatt Homes development (still to be approved) went ahead north of the bypass. That development includes a primary school with access via an as-yet-unused footbridge over the road east of the site.
Councillor Alex Brenton said: “There is a screaming need for a facility in Blandford, which has had a lot of new housing using the HRC, and the Wyatt development will be happening. The site is more part of Blandford, with houses drifting out beyond the bypass.
I am concerned that this ignores the fact that we are trying to push people out of cars to get to work but it is nicely designed, and the attenuation pond is a useful wildlife resource in its own right. Despite reservations about not linking into the modern way of life, I am in favour and will propose.”
Seconding her proposal, which was approved by eight votes to one, Councillor Sherry Jespersen said there was a convincing case for need. “No-one is comfortable with a site in an AONB but I am satisfied it’s the right site, and the least intrusive that it can be.”
She urged that tree planting and landscape management at the entrance should match that now existing on the bypass, and asked that the one-way advisory route for lorries on the A350 and C13 should apply to waste lorries.
On 21 April, Peter Cox from AC Archaeology will be talking to the Blandford Museum Archaeology Group about the investigation at the site, which revealed “tantalising insights into life and death in the Iron Age”. (Blandford Parish Centre, 7.30pm, free to museum members/£3.)

by Nicci Brown