A quick stocktake

I had reason this week to stop and look back over the work that has gone into the proposed Glan Devon biosolids project since I first started writing about it in June.

I hadn't really counted it before. Like most things of this sort, one question led to another, one document led to another, and before long the pile had become rather larger than expected.

The first DeeperInsight article on Glan Devon was published on 18 June. A little over three months later, the archive contains 54 substantive articles, amounting to roughly 152,000 words. If I was writing a novel that would be about 550 pages as a paperback!

There are another couple of website and background pages around those, so the public DeeperInsight archive currently contains 56 pages associated with the work.

That is a fair amount of reading, and rather more writing than I had anticipated.

It started with a development application

The original idea was fairly simple. Read the development application, understand what was being proposed and try to explain some of it in ordinary language.

That quickly expanded.

The application touches on planning, engineering, waste processing, traffic, air quality, water, environmental management, agriculture, economics, product manufacture and regulation. Each of those subjects has its own reports, assumptions and terminology, and quite a few of them depend on what is happening somewhere else in the proposed operation.

So the work gradually moved from reading individual reports to checking how the pieces fitted together.

Behind the public articles, the working collection now contains nearly 200 project and supporting files that have been catalogued and reviewed. The proposal has also been worked through systematically across 38 separate areas of assessment, ranging from planning and site suitability through to plant operation, environmental controls, monitoring and closure.

That does not mean there are 38 objections. It means the project has been examined from 38 different directions.

The website changed along the way

DeeperInsight also changed as the investigation grew.

It began as somewhere to put longer explanations that were difficult to deal with properly in Facebook posts. As more material accumulated, it became a record of the questions being asked, the ideas being tested and the way my understanding of the proposal developed over time.

Some articles are quite technical. Others deal with planning or assessment process. Some are simply attempts to explain a difficult idea without requiring the reader to have an engineering degree.

That is where Bill, Tom and Dog wandered into the story.

They have now dealt with tractors, fences, cowpats, sawdust, biscuits, sheep washes, fertiliser factories and a variety of other rural disasters, usually while trying to make sense of something considerably more complicated.

The humour helps, but the questions underneath it are serious.

This is not really about smell

One thing I would like people to understand is the amount of work that now sits behind the community discussion.

It would be very easy to describe opposition to a project like this as people saying, “we don't want it”, “there will be too many trucks” or “it might smell”.

Those concerns are legitimate in their own right, but that is not where the work has gone.

The application has been read closely. Supporting reports have been compared. Numbers have been checked. The history of parts of the proposal has been researched. Planning documents and legislation have been examined. Where claims depend on assumptions, those assumptions have been followed.

Sometimes the answer has supported what the applicant says. Sometimes it has raised another question. Occasionally it has shown that the question being answered was not quite the one that needed answering.

That is the nature of technical review.

Why Glan Devon?

Through all of that work, one question has remained remarkably persistent.

Why Glan Devon?

That is not shorthand for “we don't like it here”. It is a planning question.

The proposal is for High Impact Industry on rural land, so the location itself forms part of the assessment. The community is entitled to ask why this site has been chosen, how that choice fits the planning framework and whether the case for putting the development there has actually been demonstrated.

You do not need to oppose the technology to ask that question.

You do not need to oppose biosolids recycling either.

You simply have to expect a significant industrial development to make a convincing case for both what it proposes to do and where it proposes to do it. Especially when the proposal sits at odds to the local government strategy.

A few numbers

So, as a simple stocktake at the end of September:

54 substantive DeeperInsight articles

About 152,000 published words

56 public archive pages associated with the Glan Devon work

Nearly 200 project and supporting files catalogued in the working material

38 separate areas examined in the structured review

More than three months of reading, checking, writing and trying to explain what is actually being proposed.

And, for reasons I still don't entirely understand, a growing collection of watercolour illustrations involving Bill, Tom and Dog.

Those numbers are not offered as proof that every conclusion is right. Volume is not the same thing as quality.

They do show that the community response is not simply an emotional reaction to an unfamiliar project.

That is probably the main point

The purpose of all this work has never been to produce the largest possible pile of criticism.

It has been to understand the proposal well enough to ask sensible questions of it.

That means reading beyond the executive summary, checking whether different documents agree, understanding what the planning rules actually say and being prepared to follow technical questions wherever they lead.

A community does not need its own engineering consultancy or planning department to take part seriously in a development assessment. It does need people prepared to read, question, compare and keep asking for clear answers.

That is what has been happening here.

There is still more to come, and the assessment process is still moving. For the moment, though, it seemed worth recording just how much work has already gone into trying to understand one proposed development at Glan Devon.

Bill would probably say we have made a reasonable start.

Tom would say we have written far too much.

Dog would be wondering why we are still talking when there is clearly more digging to do.

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