South Tyne and Wear plans greener alternative to landfill
Household rubbish from Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland is set to be converted into energy rather than sent to landfill, thanks to new greener plans announced this month.
The South Tyne and Wear Waste Management Partnership has revealed that a SITA Consortium made up of SITA UK, Royal Bank of Scotland and Catalyst Lend Lease, has won a competitive tender to build and operate a facility that will treat around 190,000 tonnes of their rubbish per year and turn it into electricity.
The electricity created each year will be the equivalent of the amount of energy used by 37,500 homes.
The South Tyne and Wear Waste Management Partnership comprises three councils - Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland City - who have joined forces to create a more effective way of managing household rubbish.
The Partnership is set to almost double its recycling rate by 2020 and treat the waste that’s left to prevent it ending up in landfills. Burying rubbish creates the greenhouse gas methane and is also expensive due to Government taxes. The new plans will save the Partnership’s residents over £300million over the next 25 years – when compared to the cost of continuing to send waste to landfills.
The rubbish collected will be sorted and bulked-up in the Partnership area before being transported to a state-of-the-art facility that will be built in Teesside. The waste will be treated by energy-from-waste which is a process that burns rubbish. This will create electricity which can be sold to the national grid or turned into steam to heat buildings.
Treating the rubbish by Energy from Waste in Teesside will result in a total carbon saving of 64,000 tonnes of CO2 per year compared to the current arrangements of sending waste to landfill - this is the equivalent to removing 21,700 cars from the road.
Sixty-six operational jobs will be created locally and on Teesside and around 100 construction jobs. The facility is set to be up and running in 2013.
To boost recycling a new kerbside scheme is being introduced across Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland. The black recycling boxes are being phased out and replaced by a blue wheeled bin that allows residents to recycle plastic and cardboard, as well as paper, glass and cans.
Chairman of the Partnership, Cllr Martin Gannon, said: 'This is great news for our residents. Not only have they got the much improved kerbside recycling service they asked for, they are now having their non-recycled rubbish converted into a useful resource too. Forming a partnership with the SITA Consortium to build our treatment facility is a major milestone in the three Councils’ quest to find more sustainable ways of managing our waste.'
In July 2008 the Partnership was awarded £73.5million of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) money from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to go towards the development of a waste treatment facility.
A raft of other new waste contracts designed to divert waste away from landfills and create a more sustainable future for waste services have also been developed.
