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Cory set for giant London waste management contract

London’s Western Riverside Waste Authority is set to sign a 30-year waste disposal contract with Cory Environmental by the summer.

Cory has out-bid Cleanaway and Central London Waste Management (which includes SITA) to gain the “several hundred million pound” contract which is due be ratified in a few months time.

Colin James, a spokesman for Western Riverside, said: “We had three very professional bidders but Cory was by far the best. We should be in a position to sign by July, but the contract includes a collateral warranty which the different council committees have to sign and so may delay the process slightly.”

The authority currently spends about 23 million a year on waste services and is responsible for the disposal of waste from 870,000 residents in the London Boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, Wandsworth and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Authority chairman councillor Bryan Levitt said: “The contract will be based firmly on the principles of minimising waste and maximising recycling and reuse. I am confident that we can successfully conclude negotiations, after which we will be in the vanguard of this new approach which represents the future for good waste management.”

Western Riverside currently has contracts with Cory and Cleanaway and both these companies provide a barge service to take waste to Essex. The authority has two waste transfer stations situated on the River Thames in South London, one at Smugglers Way in Wandsworth and the other in Cringle Dock, Battersea.

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Unloading waste from Western Riverside at Cory's wharf on the river thames at Mucking

The waste is delivered to the riverside stations and then compacted into ISO containers, loaded onto barges and transferred to the Cory landfill site on the Thames Estuary at Mucking, Essex. This transport and disposal operation is currently let under contract to Cory Environmental. The contract in tandem with the Transfer Stations Management Contract is due to expire in October 2002.

Cory says that the Western Riverside contract is important because a long-term commitment means that they can make and justify the 100 million investment that they have made at the wharf. Cory has had the river contract for 14 years and extended the site five years ago by 100 metres. It is currently seeking planning permission for an extension to raise the site’s height by two metres as an area 160m x 60m x 2m is filled each day.

The facility on the Thames Estuary also has a generating plant which serves 80,000 households via the national grid.

The Western Riverside contract, which will start in October 2002, will enable the authority to meet its recycling targets as well as those set by the government. It will include a new automated recycling system to be built in Wandsworth, which will be the biggest of its kind in the UK capable of processing 84,000 tonnes of recyclable materials. An Energy from Waste facility also has been proposed in Belvedere, south east London.

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