Project Transform granted £129m PFI funding
15 June 2009
Defra has awarded £129.1 million in PFI funding to a long term waste management project involving a partnership of three West Midlands councils.
The joint initiative called ‘Project Transform' - which is comprised of Coventry city council, Solihull metropolitan borough council and Warwickshire county council - is set to use the funding to help develop a 305,000 tonne-a-year capacity energy-from-waste (EfW) facility to help serve the region's waste disposal needs.
With Warwickshire a two-tier authority, the five district and borough councils in the county are also included, which are: North Warwickshire borough council, Nuneaton and Bedworth borough council, Rugby borough council, Stratford on Avon district council and Warwick district council.
Project Transform has commented in its policy documents that: "Coventry and Solihull have successfully collaborated in the operation of an existing Energy from Waste (EfW) facility in Coventry for over 15 years and are drawing on this experience to develop the sub-regional partnership with Warwickshire."
Diversion
The project, which applied for credits in March 2008, intends to use the facility to help divert 427,000 tonnes of biodegradable municipal waste a year from landfill by 2020 and would involve replacing the existing, 240,000 tonnes-a-year capacity EfW facility in Coventry with a new plant.
Plans to gain financing for the project have come under fire from some environmental groups in the region over concerns that the long-term strategy was based on out-dated predictions of waste arisings and a failure to take into account the area's current recycling performance (see letsrecycle.com story).
Responding to the criticism, the councils had claimed that the use of EfW was only as a reference technology in its funding application and that other treatment technologies would be possible.
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Under ‘Project Transform', the three councils involved intend to also achieve a 50% recycling rate. However, campaigners remain critical of the projections backing the proposal and claim that there are already measures in place to reduce the amount of residual waste arising in the area.
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