Artist's impression of Viridor's energy-from-waste incinerator at Trident Park.

The Welsh Government has announced that it has secured over £105 million of funding for South East Wales’s energy-from-waste project, amounting to £4.2 million of funding for each year of the 25-year contract.

The money will provide around a quarter of the entire budget needed to fund the Prosiect Gwyrdd incineration project, with the remaining 75 per cent to be met by five councils involved in waste project: Caerphilly, Cardiff, Monmouthshire, Newport and the Vale of Glamorgan in South East Wales.

Project details

The incineration facility, currently under construction at Trident Park in Cardiff, is set to burn around 172,00 tonnes of the partnership’s non-recyclable waste a year, producing enough energy to power around 50,000 homes. The facility will have a total capacity to process around 350,000 tonnes per year and produce 30 megawatts of electricity.

Although no contract has yet been signed for the running of the facility, the local authority partnership appointed waste management company Viridor as preferred bidder in March 2013, following a provisional appointment in February 2013.

The councils have said that they are working with Viridor to finalise the agreed terms of the contract, ‘with a view to signing the contract by the end of September’.

Viridor’s Trident Park facility is hoped to help the government achieve its target of sending zero waste to landfill by 2025, in line with its ‘Towards Zero Waste’ strategy and save the five councils £500 million over the next 25 years (compared to current landfill operations).

The councils have said that the contract will ensure that there is ‘flexibility’ on the amount of waste that is delivered to the facility, as the predicted waste tonnage profiles have been calculated on the basis that all five councils meet or exceed the waste targets set out by the Welsh Government.

Landfill ‘no longer an option’

Speaking after the funding announcement, Councillor Russell Goodway, Chairman of the Joint Committee, said: “In the current challenging economic climate, this project shows the benefits of councils working together in partnership and benefitting from the financial support from the Welsh Government.”

Wales’s Minister for Natural Resources, Alun Davies, added: “At a time when councils across Wales are facing an unprecedentedly difficult financial climate and working to improve services with reduced resources, this facility will help councils in South East Wales save money, which can instead be spent on our schools, libraries and roads.

“Sending waste to landfill is literally throwing our money away.”

He added: ”We are working hard to ensure that we prevent, minimise, reuse or recycle as much of our waste as possible. However, for the waste left over, it is far better to use it to create energy that can power our homes and businesses than to bury it in the ground.

“Sending our waste to landfill and leaving it to rot is no longer an option – it uses up our land and damages our environment. As well as creating jobs in the waste and resource management industry and saving our councils money, Prosiect Gwyrdd will cut Wales’s carbon emissions and help reduce climate change.”

The incinerator is expected to create up to 360 jobs during construction and 36 full-time jobs when in operation.

Overcapacity

The Trident Park plant is one of the latest of several energy-from-waste plants to get the go-ahead, despite a recent report from Eunomia Research & Consulting suggesting that the UK could see overcapacity in residual waste treatment plants by 2015, if the current rate of construction is not curbed. The report suggests that due to increased emphasis on recycling, reusing and recovering material, residual waste rates are falling, leaving incinerators without the required levels of waste needed to produce efficient and cost-effective processes.

However, Viridor estimates that there will be demand for circa 20 million tonnes of EfW capacity in 2020 (up from the current six million tonnes), and could result in a ‘significant capacity shortfall’ in the UK.

Read more about Prosiect Gwyrdd.