The company has decided not to appeal the city council's refusal to give planning permission for the facility, stating that such an appeal would have continued an “uncertain future” for waste management in Aberdeen.
Had it gone ahead, the plant would have been Scotland's largest incinerator, processing 160,000 tonnes of waste a year. The plant would also have included a materials recycling facility for the sorting of about 11,400 tonnes of recyclables a year.
SITA had been considering an appeal, but decided that “an appeal was unlikely to succeed”. The company said it recognised that energy from waste was not the community's favoured approach and that another solution to residual waste should be found.
The company's general manager for Aberdeen, Peter Lawrence, said: “SITA UK and Aberdeen city council have spent a considerable amount of time considering the way forward and after much deliberation felt that it would not be in anyone's interest to pursue an appeal.”
Targets
Under SITA's 25-year waste disposal contract with Aberdeen, it handles about 130,000 tonnes of municipal waste each year and must reduce the amount going to landfill by 40% by 2005/06. The current recycling rate for municipal waste must increase from the current 15% to 25% by 2005/06.
Last week saw the roll out of an expansion to the city's kerbside recycling collection service, with an additional 20,000 homes in the north west of the city joining the scheme. The households will have cans, glass, plastic bottles, paper and card collected every fortnight from next week, using a black box and a white bag.
Fines
Despite the forthcoming recycling service expansions, council officers predict that if the Scottish Executive fines Aberdeen 200 a tonne for missing its Landfill Allowance Scheme targets, the council could end up paying 2 million a year in fines.
The council has been lobbying the Executive to “moderate” this level of fines from the full start of the scheme next April until infrastructure funded by the Strategic Waste Fund is in place.
With the council's “very tight targets” on recycling still to meet, SITA said in the next few months it will consult with the council and residents on how to treat the city's residual waste. “This is an opportunity for everyone in the city to be part of the decision-making process,” Mr Lawrence said.
The council is now looking into new residual waste treatment technologies, with the Environment and Infrastructure committee recently approving a 30,000 study of technologies used in other countries including Germany and Sweden.
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