The contracts would see waste processed into RDF in Norfolk at FCC’s waste transfer station at Costessy, aggregates company Frimstone’s waste transfer station at Wisbech and RDF firm Seneca’s waste transfer station at Rackheath before export to R1 combined heat and power plants in Europe.
Members of the council’s environment, development and transport committee will meet on Friday to discuss the future of Norfolk’s waste, which is currently sent to a landfill site in Aldeby as well as to energy from waste (EfW) plants run by Suez at Great Blakenham and FCC in Allington. Some is also exported to Rotterdam as RDF.
This arrangement followed Norfolk’s controversial decision in April 2014 to scrap plans for a 268,000 tonnes per year capacity EfW plant in King’s Lynn after Defra pulled funding for the project, which was developed under a £500 million, 25-year deal with consortium Cory Wheelabrator (see letsrecycle.com story).
The new RDF deals under discussion this week would account for 160,000 tonnes per year of the county’s waste, and work in addition to the existing deal agreed with Suffolk county council in May 2015 to send 40,000 tonnes of waste to the Great Blakenham EfW plant near Ipswich until 2020 (see letsrecycle.com story).
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According to the council, awarding new deals from April 2016 to export the county’s waste as RDF will save £2 million each year in waste management costs compared to the current arrangements, which cost £39 million a year.
Under the contracts, household waste would be sent to waste transfer stations at Costessy, Rackheath and Wisbech to remove metals for recycling before the remaining material is processed into RDF and sent to CHP facilities in the Netherlands and Germany.
End of landfill
The council said the new contracts, for which potential bidders were first sought in February (see letsrecycle.com story), are the first stage in delivering a new waste management strategy up to 2020 and would bring an end the council’s landfilling of waste from April 2016 onwards.
Chair of the committee, UKIP councillor Toby Coke, said: “An end to using landfill in Norfolk has been a long held ambition for our county, so if councillors decide to give these contracts the green light, it will mark a big step forward in the way we deal with our waste.
“If approved, they would see us using waste much better than ever before by generating useful resources from it – like metals for recycling and power – and significantly reducing our waste management carbon footprint, equivalent of taking more than 30,000 cars off the road in Norfolk, over current landfill arrangements, instead of letting it meaninglessly rot away in the ground.
“They would use spare capacity at waste treatment facilities that are already up and running, and using locally based companies, and their workforces, as part of the process. And of course, they’ll save us £2m a year, helping to plug the huge funding gap this authority needs to make in these difficult times.”
Future strategy
Cllr Coke said that while the authority still needed to “pin down” its long term strategy for dealing with waste after 2020 amid an expected growth in Norfolk’s waste generation, the RDF contracts would provide “breathing space to study new technologies and to see if they can be used here in the future”.
He added: “We have commissioned due diligence to be carried out on these and we are asking waste companies to come forward with sustainable solutions, which we’ll be consulting on in the early part of next year.
“We are working much harder together with all of Norfolk’s waste authorities to generate more recycling by getting it out of our residual waste bins. The Norfolk Waste Partnership has been stepping up its recycling campaigns and we have set ourselves a target of helping residents reduce what’s in our waste bins by 1kg a week per household.”
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