The Authority – which comprises Hammersmith & Fulham, Lambeth, Wandsworth and Kensington & Chelsea councils – entered into a 30-year waste management contract with the firm in 2002, for the treatment of around 400,000 tonnes of residual waste and recyclables per year.
Residual waste is treated at Cory’s Riverside Resource Recovery (RRR) energy-from-waste plant at Belvedere on the banks of the River Thames. The R1 certified facility, which has an annual treatment capacity of 670,000 tonnes, was completed in May 2013.
According to a report delivered to Hammersmith & Fulham council’s policy & accountability committee last month, the cost of treatment of waste at the plant is currently set at £142 per tonne, which the council notes is more than it is likely to cost to send the material to landfill.
Cost
In the report, it states: “The disposal of waste using the EfW facility was expected to be cheaper than landfill, but once the government ended the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme (LATS) five years later, that cost advantage disappeared.
“A comparison between the cost per tonne for EfW and for landfill today is difficult to make, but it appears that EfW costs may fall within the range of landfill costs, but at the higher end of that scale.”
And, while the council notes that sending the material to landfill is not considered to be a viable alternative option, it has begun exploring a number of areas it can seek to reduce the cost of the service.
These include refinancing the joint EfW company – RRRL – set up between the councils and the contractor, or supporting heat off take from the EfW plant to local factories.
Options
The councils have also considered lobbying to relax planning conditions restricting the amount of waste that can be transported to the facility by road. Currently, all but 85,000 tonnes of the waste treated at the Belvedere facility is transported by barge.
Hammersmith & Fulham has also claimed there have been concerns over the ‘transparency’ of the governance of the WRWA, including over access to contracts.
The council claimed there was “clear evidence” that they were paying the ‘highest gate fees in the country’ for the handling of commingled recyclables, which was in part due to a £20 per tonne cost capital repayment of the Smugglers Way materials recycling facility (MRF).
And, despite subsequently challenging and renegotiating these costs, Hammersmith & Fulham claims that some other London boroughs still ‘appear to be getting a better deal for their recyclate.’
It added: “The WCAs [Waste Collection Authority members of the WRWA] agreed to a further investigation into market opportunities to ensure boroughs are receiving the best deal available within any contractual and practical constraints, but would welcome WRWA improving the current deal.”
A review is also underway – headed by the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB) and consultancy Eunomia – to investigate the potential benefit of the four WRWA boroughs redirecting their commingled recyclate from Smugglers Way to an alternative MRF. According to Hammersmith & Fulham, the findings of this review are currently being discussed with WRWA officers.
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