Five years after its launch, the controversial £1.4 billion energy-from-waste incinerator near Knaresborough has been declared a success, even by some of the community leaders who voted against it.

The landmark Allerton Park plant, near the junction of the A1(M) and the A59 east of Knaresborough, drew fierce opposition and High Court legal challenges after being declared the best solution to managing 320,000 tonnes of waste a year to improve green disposal methods and avoid landfill costs.

Since the facility opened in 2018, Allerton Waste Recovery Park has continuously exceeded its 70 per cent target for diverting residents’ waste from landfill, achieving nearly 93 per cent last year.

However, the facility has never met the City of York and North Yorkshire Council’s target of recycling five per cent of items in the general waste, only managing just over two per cent for the first time last year.

But Councillor Greg White, North Yorkshire Council’s executive member for waste management, said the continued failure to hit the recycling target was partly caused by a positive reason.

Speaking ahead of a meeting of the council’s transport, environment and economy scrutiny committee examining the plant’s performance, he said that since residents separated high amounts of recyclable materials from their general waste, relatively little material of sufficient quality to recycle was being left to mechanically separate at the plant.

He said overall the facility had proved a success, but needed to increase the amount of energy which could be extracted from general waste at the same time as pressure was mounting from the government to have separate food waste collections.

The meeting heard Robert Windass, the Conservative councillor for Boroughbridge, claim that missing the waste recycling target was due to “the idleness of people who live in the houses who cannot be bothered to put it in their recycling bins”.

Cllr Windass, who went against his Conservative colleagues by voting against the facility as he did not believe the facility would be the best deal for taxpayers, said:

There were a lot of people in the community worried about pollution coming out of the chimneys, but there hasn’t been.”

Cllr Windass said chairing a residents’ liaison committee with the site had been “a hell of a job to start with”, with people fearing the plant would impact on their quality of life and house prices. He said:

“It does work very well. Residents are much more relaxed about it now. The only complaint which we get is HGVs queuing on the road if they can’t get into the site.”

The scrutiny committee heard that since the facility was launched it had dealt with more than 1.5 million tonnes of waste and saved 330,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

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But the meeting also heard that councils were effectively incentivised to provide as much waste as possible as they are paid for it by the site’s operator, which in turn acted as a disincentive to educate residents more about what to recycle.

Councillors were told while processing waste from Derbyshire increased North Yorkshire’s carbon emissions at the site, efforts were underway to cut overall emissions from the site.

After the meeting, the authority’s leader, Conservative Councillor Carl Les, said:

“I thought it was the right thing to do at the time and I still think it’s the right thing to do.

“People call it an incinerator, but it’s producing energy from waste. We should all adopt that hierarchy reduce, recycle, re-use, but there comes a point where you can’t any further, so to get rid of the residual waste and generating energy I think is the right thing.

“I would now like to see some way of capturing the waste heat that is generated and capturing that and we are looking at partners to come next to the site and use that heat.”

His comment is likely to draw criticism from Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Andrew Jones, who this week raised concerns about further development – or “industrial creep” – at the site.