Agenda item

Councillor Bruce asked Councillor Poole the following question:

“Given the smaller than usual amount of seaweed recovered from the coastline this year, can Councillor Poole assure us that any underspend is directed at looking for more sustainable and efficient ways of collection and disposal in future years?”

Councillor Poole’s answer was as follows:

We were very fortunate this year. The winds and tides only managed to deposit 2,000 tons of seaweed on our beaches. Last year, it was much, much more.

Seaweed removal by the Council during the summer months this year was very successful.  There were specific arrangements in place to remove the seaweed from the beaches, plus new arrangements to use farmers’ fields for spreading the seaweed.  Additionally, there was a dedicated webpage with its seaweed barometer; I must mention significant efforts by the communications team to keep the public informed.  The arrangements used this year are already in place for next year with an extra farm site added.

The majority of the cost for our seaweed removal is down to directly employed staff, who undertake this work and drive the vehicles involved.  Two thousand tons of seaweed represents a significant volume of work.  Internal staff are used to remove the seaweed as and when required.  At other times, they are employed on other coastline work.  There may be some small savings when the final accounts are done, especially as staff involved managed to get reduced vehicle hire charges, and these savings will contribute to preserving the levels of council reserves next year.

Alternative processes for dealing with seaweed such as anaerobic digestion or in-vessel composting have been explored, but these are generally impractical or unrealistic due to the nature of the seaweed and would involve the council paying significant amounts to use them.  Any process would still involve the cost of removal and transport and so would represent no saving over our current arrangements.  The benefit of field spreading is that this requires no extra processing; the spreading is undertaken by the farmers and is licensed by the Environment Agency.  The Environment Agency is required to license the spreading of seaweed on farmers’ fields to ensure that the quality of extracted drinking water is not compromised.  Whilst this remains the lowest cost option, using more costly and inappropriate alternatives would not be correct.  Options to sell seaweed have also been explored at times but nobody is seeking this and it would not, in any case, deal with more than a tiny fraction of the amount the Council removes each year.

As always, we are open to new ideas and proposals on this front, but they have to confer either a significant cost advantage over the current arrangements or present a significant environmental opportunity at the same cost.  So far, we have not found anything that does this.

I would like to thank all the staff involved for the efficient way the seaweed problem was dealt with this year.”

Councillor Bruce then asked Councillor Poole a supplementary question, as follows:

Having mentioned in February that you were dealing with a number of farms, I would like clarification that, as I understand, one at least has failed.  How are you monitoring that process?

Councillor Poole responded:

One of the fields that we had lined up wasn’t available so wasn’t used, but we have an extra farm for next year.  We have sufficient capacity to deposit the seaweed.