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North Yorkshire County Council is set to bid for £300,000 to help improve the environmental credentials of waste collections and a controversial waste incinerator plant.

The authority has applied to the United Kingdom’s innovation agency for funding to investigate addressing barriers for generating low carbon fuel sources on the Allerton Park Waste Recovery site near Knaresborough, either as biomethane or green hydrogen.

The council is hoping to be among 20 nationally to be handed a Fast Followers award by Innovate UK, which aims to equip local authorities with the experience and skills to accelerate progress towards net zero.

The move comes as the authority is consulting with the public on its climate change strategy, which includes increasing access to alternative fuels for vehicles and investigating the feasibility of green hydrogen and other low carbon fuels as technology develops.

The strategy also includes a proposal to investigate how the council’s assets, such as land and buildings, can best be used to generate low carbon energy to offset council carbon emissions.

Significantly, the strategy includes looking for such opportunities at the energy from waste plant and closed landfill sites, and for vegetation management and food waste for anaerobic digestion.

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An officer’s report to a meeting of senior officers and councillors states the potential gases generated at the site would be predominantly to use as a transport fuel for general and recycling waste vehicles as an alternative to fossil fuels, but options for income generation would also be explored.

The report adds other potential benefits would include improved energy security and releasing grid capacity for other renewable energy sources at the sub-station.

The report states after recyclates and organic materials have been extracted from the waste delivered by 70 waste trucks from across the county to Allerton Park, the remaining residual waste is incinerated in the energy from waste incinerator, which generates heat and power.

It states:

“Currently the electricity is sold to the National Grid and the heat is underutilised.

“Decarbonising both the waste plant and the vehicles that transport waste to the site is technically possible, but extremely challenging due to the technological change required, systems change and the costs to deploy.”

Cllr Arnold Warneken, whose division includes Allerton Park, said there was significant debate whether the energy from waste incinerator could be regarded as producing renewable energy as it relied on the production of waste to be sustainable.