Environmental concerns have been raised over the performance of a controversial £1.2 billion waste recovery plant near Knaresborough after it emerged it has never met recycling targets.
A meeting of North Yorkshire County Council’s transport, environment and economy scrutiny committee heard councillors question whether the Allerton Park Waste Recovery venture had turned out to be fundamentally flawed.
The council awarded a contract to private company AmeyCespa to create the facility in 2014. It can process up to 320,000 tonnes of waste per year from York and North Yorkshire councils.
Peter Jeffreys, head of waste for both York and North Yorkshire councils told the meeting that since the site was launched in March 2018 “it’s been a slightly rocky start”, but there were a lot of positive signs that the plant was moving in the right direction.
He said councils were paying £3 less per tonne of waste than was forecast before the plant, which takes 220,000 tonnes of public waste and 50,000 tonnes of business waste annually, became operational.
A report to the meeting detailed how the councils had set a target of recycling or composting five per cent of the household waste it received, but the amount actually recycled or composted was between one and two per cent.
As a result of missing the targets, the councils levied AmeyCespa with a total of £653,000 in performance deductions for the first three years of the operation alone.
Mr Jeffreys said:
“Whilst we are levying those reductions it doesn’t give us any satisfaction. We would far rather they hit the targets.”
Mr Jeffreys said the environmental targets had been missed partly because the mechanical treatment part of the plant had not been reliable. He said Amey had reconfigured the plant to push more materials through the mechanical treatment process.
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He said covid had led to staff shortages, which had seen the mechanical treatment area bypassed on some occasions.
25-year contract
In response, some councillors questioned whether the system was proving as much as a success as had been forecast when the scheme was approved amid a public outcry.
Cllr David Goode, a Liberal Democrat who represents Knaresborough, said the situation did not appear as positive as the council was making out, having missed key targets since the operation launched.
He said he was “struggling” with the initiative, bearing in mind the authority’s carbon reduction strategy, the government’s revised policies over waste management and the drive towards reducing reliance on single use items.
Cllr Goode said:
“And then I look at a 25-year contract that seems to encourage us to maximise that amount of waste we are putting through to get the financial returns that we’re looking for and a government strategy that seems to indicate we would have to fundamentally change the nature of the contract that we have currently got.”
Mr Jeffreys said the authority was not “incentivising maximising waste”, but rather was finding a good end destination for business waste that could otherwise end up in landfill.”
‘Fantastic asset’
The committee’s chairman, Cllr Stanley Lumley, a Conservative who represents Pateley Bridge, said:
“Allerton waste plant was very controversial when it was going through the process of council and planning. I think it’s proved to be a fantastic asset for North Yorkshire.”
The council’s waste executive director Cllr Derek Bastiman said after visiting the site he was encouraged to see the amount of cardboard and plastic that was recovered from general waste.
He said:
“It’s still the families that need educating on keeping their waste clean, whether that’s plastic bottle or cardboard.
“If they did that then we could recycle more than we do. If families could just be a bit more considerate when disposing of their waste that would certainly help with our figures.”
