The council has agreed a deal with Lakeside Energy from Waste Ltd, a joint venture between Grundon Waste Management and Viridor Waste Management, to develop the incinerator near Heathrow.
Under the arrangement, waste will be taken by Wiltshire's landfill and composting contractor Hills Group to the Berkshire facility, which is expected to open in 2008.
Overall, the merchant facility at Colnbrook will capable of taking 400,000 tonnes of waste a year to produce 37 MW of electricity.
Richard Skehens, a director of Lakeside EfW, said: “We are very pleased that these contract negotiations have been concluded. The result is a partnership for the future.”
Toby Sturgis, the cabinet member for planning and waste, said: “The contract is part of the county council's long term waste management strategy which pledges to boost the proportion of the county's waste that is recycled or converted into energy, and massively cut the amount buried in landfill.”
Targets
Under the new contract, Wiltshire council hopes to meet challenging government targets to divert municipal waste from landfill under Defra's Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme.
In January, Hills Group laid down plans for a mechanical biological treatment plant to recover recyclable material mixed waste collected in the west of the county (see letsrecycle.com story).
However, local environmental campaigners around Slough have criticised Wiltshire council for sending waste out of county boundaries for treatment.
West London Friends of the Earth said Wiltshire “wants to transport its rubbish to Slough so that it can be burnt there and the pollution can blow over us”.
But Andy Conn, waste services manager at Wiltshire county council, explained that the distance to Slough, at around 65 miles, was only marginally further than to the 40 miles the waste was already travelling to the Lower Compton landfill site in North Wiltshire.
He also explained that when Wiltshire council went out to tender for technology to treat 100,000 tonnes of waste a year, it had only received three serious expressions of interest – for autoclaving, MBT and incineration.
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He said: “Nobody bid to provide a local energy from waste facility and the concern with autoclaving was whether the output would still be reliant on landfill. We had a couple of suitable sites for energy from waste plants but no proposals.
“We didn’t want to build a bigger MBT plant as the one we had met all our local cement kiln's needs for refuse derived fuel and there is no established market yet for RDF,” Mr Conn added.
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