WRG wins 40m recycling centre contract

And, the Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham (BDR) Partnership has also revealed that it has concluded the first stage of the procurement process for its 30-year, PFI-funded waste treatment project – with a total of nine bidders believed to have been invited to submit outline proposals for the contract award.

Northampton-based Waste Recycling Group (WRG) took over responsibility for managing the three councils' household waste recycling centres (HWRC) on October 29, with an initial seven year contract including the option of being extended by a further three years.

Jim Meredith, chief executive of Spanish-owned WRG, said: “We are delighted to have won this contract and are looking forward to providing an improved service to the people of Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham, and to add value to the excellent efforts they are currently making to recover more value and resource from their waste.

“WRG already has a strong presence in Yorkshire and can therefore provide a tailored service based on local knowledge, as well as our wide experience and expertise from managing a large number of successful recycling centres across the UK,” he added.

As part of the contract, WRG has committed to provide a “meet and greet” service for members of the public using the sites, as well as improving segregation of materials with better signage and increasing the range of materials that can be accepted at the sites.

PFI

The news comes as the BDR Partnership announced the next steps in the procurement process for its 30-year waste treatment project, which received £77.4 million in PFI funding from Defra in April 2008 (see letsrecycle.com story).

Interested parties had until October 2 to submit outline proposals for the contract and, in a statement the partnership said it “will spend the following weeks up to December understanding and assessing these, after which we will ask for more detailed information to be submitted for further consideration”.

While the councils have said that the number and identity of bidders will not be revealed yet due to commercial confidentiality, last week Shanks Group announced that it had bid for the contract as part of its new partnership with Scottish and Southern Energy (see letsrecycle.com story).

And, council documents reveal that nine bidders were invited to submit outline proposals for the contract award.

The partnership has stressed that bidders will be able to suggest both their own technology option and choice of site for the facility, stating that: “The partnership has no preset ideal what technology – or combination of technologies – would be preferred and has asked interested bidders to propose their individual solutions.

“The bidders then have to persuade the partnership that their solution is the most economical, sustainable and efficient way of dealing with the region's waste,” it added.

However, the preferred technology in the bid's OBC combined a 150,000 tonne-a-year capacity plant using Energy-from-Waste (EfW) and combined heat and power (CHP) technology to process residual waste from Barnsley and Rotherham, and an 80,000 tonne-a-year capacity mechanical biological treatment (MBT) facility that would reprocess Doncaster's waste into a solid recovered fuel.

Sites

And, the PFI application process also saw the partnership putting forward one site from each council area, but it has stated that “it is expected that bidders may also put forward other or more preferred sites”.

The three sites are among those being examined during the councils' Development Plan Document (DPD) process, which is being held until December to identify a shortlist of six available locations for the development of waste facilities.

The partnership aims to select a preferred bidder for the contract in May 2010 and to award the contract in July 2010, with the target of having the treatment facilities up-and-running in 2014.