Millions of litres of water used to clean and screen

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The boundary of the site is over 4 miles long. If East Suffolk Council abides by it's own planning policies the site will need to be screened, usually by a double row of native hedging. If the entire site is screened this means over 8 miles of hedging (4 miles x 2 rows).

Commercial nurseries give similar advice to each other regarding watering which is:

• New bare root plants should have 5-10 litres of water once or twice a week (depending on the weather) for each metre of hedge. 
• Root ball hedging plants up to 120/150cm tall need 10 litres for each plant once a week,
• Plants over 120/150cm tall need 20 litres per plant once a week. 

Let's assume plants don't need watering for half a year so they need watering for 26 weeks. Let's also assume they are watered only once per week and there are 3 plants per metre. The final assumption is that not all of the site boundary will need hedging so only 4 miles of the4 4.7 miles will be watered.

So for the first two years the total water consumption  is:

• Bare root plants - 10 million litres 
• Plants up to 120 cm tall - 20 million litres
• Plants over 150cm tall - over 40 million litres! 
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East Anglia was in drought last year and more droughts are predicted. Do we really need to waste 40 million litres of water on screening something that very few residents want here?