A British town council has got bad press after it approved plans to use the heat from a crematorium to warm up the swimming pool next door.
The local authority in Redditch, a town outside Birmingham in central England, says the move will cut energy waste. Work will now begin to divert waste heat, currently escaping into the sky from the crematorium’s chimney, to the swimming pool. In what will be a first such case in the UK, 100 per cent of energy generated from the flue gas cleaning process at the crematorium will be transferred.
A senior official from Unison, Britain’s second biggest trade union, called the plan “sick, insulting and insensitive”. Redditch Borough Council leader Carole Gandy said correspondence showed 90 per cent people were in favour of the plan after the technology was explained to them.