Feature Story

From rubbish to resource

Julie Wilkinson, Waste Strategy Manager for West Sussex County Council, tells Project Datafile why waste management is worth investment.

Nearly two years ago, West Sussex County Council named waste management giant Biffa as the preferred bidder for its greenest ever contract – to operate for 25 years a flagship Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) plant, which will turn household rubbish that cannot be recycled into resources, such as compost and electricity.

This major milestone was the result of four years of complex procurement, involving the county council working closely with its partner district and borough councils, plus many years of extensive consultation with residents and stakeholders.

This consultation, in fact, is ongoing. The county council and Biffa continue to work with the wide variety of communities they serve to ensure as much non-recyclable waste is turned into a valuable resource, and that outputs from the plant will be utilised in a financial and resource efficient way.

When the contract – worth more than £1bn in today's terms – was signed and sealed in June this year, the county council recognised it could be construed as a significant burden for local taxpayers.
Unfortunately, the previous government refused to help in meeting any of the cost, despite imposing potentially significant fines on the authority for landfilling too much waste.

First, it denied West Sussex County Council access to Public Finance Initiative funding, then it failed to give local authorities landfill tax money back – money that could have been invested in alternative technologies.

However, the MBT plant represents good value for money. This is because over its lifetime the contract will save the county council more than £300m when compared to the cost of continuing to simply send waste to landfill.

The plant, which will begin operating in 2013 at Biffa's current landfill site at Brookhurst Wood, near Warnham, to the north of Horsham, will fulfil the final part of the promise the council in West Sussex made to its residents.

The pledge was: 'By working in partnership, West Sussex local authorities will reduce landfill by being leaders in waste prevention and recycling and will turn the remaining rubbish into a resource.'
That means the MBT plant is the final part of a giant jigsaw the local authorities have been piecing together in West Sussex since the turn of the 21st Century – to continually increase recycling and recover energy from household waste rather than dispose of it in expensive and unsustainable landfills.

This action is vital as West Sussex produces over 400,000 tonnes of household rubbish a year – enough to cover the runway at Gatwick Airport four times over – and current estimates forecast this could rise to 500,000 tonnes by 2030.

However, by 2020 the county council will only be able to landfill 130,000 tonnes of household rubbish a year. If this allowance is exceeded, the council could be fined £150 per tonne, in addition to disposal costs. That would put increased pressure on existing services.

Alongside the MBT facility are a range of other key initiatives that are now firmly established in West Sussex. They include:
ONE: Better Tomorrows, a not-for-profit community interest company, which is driving forward behavioural and cultural change within the community to encourage living lives in a more sustainable manner.
Better Tomorrows is spearheading a wide range of initiatives – many of them award winning – aimed at preventing waste in the first place. They include:
• Making available bargain-priced home composters and food digesters;
• Recruiting waste prevention advisers, trained volunteers who show communities how rubbish can be reduced;
• Encouraging the use of real nappies.

TWO: The refurbishing or rebuilding of the county council's network of 11 household waste recycling sites, which are operated by Viridor, making them safer, more customer-friendly and quicker to use.

THREE: A new multimillion pound recycling plant at Ford, near Arundel – one of the most advanced in Europe – is revolutionising the way recycled rubbish is handled in West Sussex.
Also operated by Viridor on the council's behalf, the plant is one of the most advanced in the UK and handles some 65,000 tonnes of kerbside collected recyclable materials, but has the capacity to annually sort 100,000 tonnes of these materials.

The plant has radically reduced the amount of miles the recycled rubbish travelled once it leaves kerbside collection bins. In the past, recyclable items, including bottles, plastic, card, paper and cans were shipped out to other sorting centres around the UK. Now they're sorted at Ford, before being sent to companies that process materials into new products, such as plastic bottles into clothes.

When all the pieces of the giant waste jigsaw are in place by 2013, West Sussex will be meeting its waste management strategy principles in full, and also will be hitting – if not beating – government and European targets.

This will mean:
• Approximately 70,000 tonnes of waste per annum will be prevented from entering bins through waste prevention initiatives;
• More than half of waste will be recycled;
• Around 80% of the remaining non-recyclable waste will be used to create resources such as energy.
And this will mean the joint aim to reduce, recycle and recover will have been fulfilled.

Julie Wilkinson
Waste Strategy Manager
West Sussex County Council

www.westsussex.gov.uk