COUNCILLORS from Anglesey and Gwynedd have joined forces with other North Wales councils to develop a £650 million eco-friendly waste incinerator.
Proposals drawn up by The North Wales Residual Waste Treatment Project, a partnership between the five North Wales coastal councils, address ways of reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill in Wales.
Stephen Penny, project director for the partnership, indicated that the scheme would bring a number of environmental and economical benefits to the North Wales coast.
“At the moment, all black-bag waste is landfilled, and there is increasingly going to be a landfill shortage – the Environment Agency have indicated there is only about five-and-a-half years of landfill left in the North Wales region.” he said. “One of the reasons to do the project is for the significant environmental benefits over landfilling.”.
“It will help authorities meet the challenging recycling and composting targets of the Welsh Assembly Government.
“By 2024/25, each authority will have to recycle 70% of waste, and also send a maximum of 5% to landfill, and we can not reach this target without a residual waste service.”
The plan, which outlines how a plant could potentially be built in Deeside to deal with refuse from across North Wales coast, is due to be passed on to the Welsh Assembly Government for further analysis in early April.
Should they agree to the terms of the project, further consultation with private sector companies would take place, with the partnership hoping to have a plant up and running in 2016.
The plans would save an estimated £138 million to the five councils involved.
“Another of the reasons we are doing this is for the economical benefits – it’ll save £138 million doing it, rather than not doing anything, over a 25 year period.
“Anglesey and Gwynedd council carried out a stand-alone option appraisal to see if it was worth joining the partnership, and it came out that they were clearly better off being in the North Wales partnership rather than doing something on their own.”
The plans detailed how waste currently dumped in landfill sites could be collected by local authorities and transported to the site in Deeside, where it would be burnt and converted into electricity through steam generators.