An officer with an environmental health job has been hired by Gloucestershire Council to assess the impact waste disposal facilities in the area could have on residents' health.
Roy Harrison is an expert on air pollution and professor of environmental health at the University of Birmingham.
He has been taken on in an attempt to help the local authority scrutinise proposals for a new disposal plant and determine whether waste incineration could have a negative effect on the health of local inhabitants.
However, speaking with the Gloucestershire Echo, Mr Harrison said: "Anyone living at the point of maximum concentration of particles - within about one kilometre of the site - would have less than one in a million chance of developing cancer because of it."
The council plans to build the new waste disposal plant in order to reduce the rubbish levels in the county, with the local authority expecting a bill of £7.7 million this year in tax only for the amount of waste produced.
Speaking with BBC News, a spokesman for the local authority said it was trying to find more environmentally-friendly ways of dealing with the refuse.
Posted by Marc Casey
