County waste firm chosen
Thursday 30th August 2007, 11:38AM BST.
A giant French-owned company is poised to take over rubbish collections across Shropshire and drive forward ambitious plans to improve recycling rates and drastically cut the amount of waste being dumped at landfill sites.
The Shropshire Waste Partnership today named Veolia Environment Services as the “preferred bidder” for its integrated waste management contract.
The deal will run for 25 to 30 years. The final contract is expected to be signed next month and is due to start in October.
It is not known how much the contract is worth as it is deemed to be confidential commercial information at this stage, but the partnership has been granted £40.8 million of Private Finance Initiative(PFI) credits towards the cost.
The partnership, which includes the county council and Bridgnorth, South Shropshire, Oswestry and North Shropshire district authorities, has been appraising contract bids from Veolia and Biffa since July last year.
Veolia is proposing a capital investment of more than £100 million in waste infrastructures.
Proposals to reduce the amount of household waste sent to landfill from 65 per cent to just five per cent by 2015 include:
- Developing an energy recovery centre with incinerator at Battlefield Enterprise Park, Shrewsbury, which will eventually produce enough electricity from waste to power more than 10,000 homes.
- Increasing Shropshire’s recycling levels to 50 per cent by 2012.
- Introducing a kerbside plastic bottle collection service in all four districts by 2010.
- Constructing two new waste management facilities at Oswestry by 2009 and Bridgnorth by 2010.
Joyce Barrow, Partnership chairman, said: “We believe that Veolia’s proposals offer the best solution to dealing with Shropshire’s waste in the most affordable and sustainable way.”
There will be no redundancies as a result of the change to a unified collection service.
Veolia Environment Services is part of the Veolia Group and has 13,000 employees in the UK with more than 80,000 worldwide. It operates across 35 countries.
By Dave Morris
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I can’t believe the council are forking out all this money. For about £50 a week I’ll drive all the rubbish to Telford town centre and dump it there. No one will notice the difference! ~When that fills up there is plenty of room on the Wrekin.
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i think its awful that they can only recyle 50% and burn the rest, its so unambitious, we should be aiming for more recycling and not considering cancer causing incinerators. Its only getting built in north shrewsbury because they are a council estate, you would never get them to build somehting like that in ludlow, or in the posh bits of shrewsbury, so the rich get richer and the poor get cancer because shropshire is so lazy it cant push up the recycling levels, great news for all us that rely on air to breathe, not!
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well we have the best facilities for this type of operation!!!! TELFORD!!!
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When I objected to the Shropshire Waste Plan at the Public Inquiry at the Shirehall in January 2004, Dr Dick van Steenis MBBS was my expert witness and he explained how plasma-gasification was the cheapest and safest method of waste disposal – having a nett cost of about £23 per tonne.
Incineration costs about £68 per tonne, with a similar additional sum due to health damage.
Incinerator emissions can be shown to be associated with a range of adverse health outcomes, including low birthweight and infant mortality.
The London Health Observatory and I have examined the same set of ONS infant mortalityy data for each of the 625 electoral wards in London for the years 2003-5. I saw at a glance that the sixty-nine electoral wards which had zero infant deaths were all free from incinerator emissions.
At least eight London newspaper articles have been written about my research, the latest being the Waltham Forest Guardian, 2 August 2007.
Note that Chingford Green is a wealthy ward, which blows to bits the false theory that “deprivation” causes infant mortality.
Some of the poorest wards in London had either zero infant deaths in 2003-5, or very low rates.
I used to live in London Borough of Bexley, where there are 21 wards, six of which had zero infant deaths during 2003-5. Those six “just happened to be” upwind of the two incinerators in Bexley and out of range of SELCHP and Edmonton incinerators.
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