Plans have been announced for a new energy-from-waste (EfW) plant on Teesside worth £250 million.

The facility will be located at Redcar Bulk Terminal (RBT), a busy port on the South Bank of the River Tees in North East England, and is being developed by PMAC Energy, a subsidiary of Yorkshire-based waste management company PMAC Environmental, which exports refuse-derived fuels (RDF) to Europe.

The company has stated that the its new Redcar facility, to be operational by 2021, will convert household and commercial waste into fuel, with an annual capacity of 500,000 tonnes of RDF, 150,000 tonnes of which will be exported. It will also be an entirely commercial business, operating without government subsidies. Investment from British Steel, part-owner of the site, and Greybull Capital has helped PMAC secure the 25-acre location.

According to PMAC Energy, up to 400 jobs will be created in the local area, a boost for the economy after the collapse and closure of the SSI steelworks on the site in 2015 cost 2,200 workers their jobs. RBT’s general manager Garry O’Malley described the news as heralding a “new era” for the the business, saying: “We’ve worked closely with PMAC Energy on this project for a number of years and it’s another reflection of the continued resurgence of Redcar Bulk Terminal and this site.”

The development comes as part of a ‘Master Plan’ for improvement in the area designed by the South Tees Development Corporation, which was set up following the SSI collapse. The group has envisioned a ‘world-class’ industrial park on the former SSI site to support the economic regeneration of Redcar and Middlesbrough.

Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen, who is also chairman of the South Tees Development Corporation, said: “Energy production has a key part to play in this transformation and it’s also important that we maximise the use of the land in this 4,500 acre area. We’re talking to more than 100 investors as part of this process.”

The news of PMAC's development comes only a month after SUEZ recycling and recovery UK officially opened its own waste incineration plant in Redcar, which takes residual waste from Merseyside and Halton. The development of yet another EfW facility in the UK will come as a blow to anti-incineration campaigners, who have been vocal in their demands for a moratorium on the burning of waste in the UK, claiming that a focus on EfW is damaging the country’s recycling rate.

While a number of municipal areas such as Madrid are committing to eliminating EfW altogether as a way to drive recycling efforts forwards, the number of incinerators in England is growing rapidly, while recycling rates are flatlining. The amount of waste sent for incineration in 2016/17 was over 10 million tonnes, an increase of more than 120 per cent since 2012/13.

Recently, the Green Party published a report into the state of waste processing in England, revealing that if current trends continue, incineration could overtake recycling before 2020. The same week, anti-incineration campaign group UKWIN (UK Without Incineration Network) claimed that the government is not properly measuring harmful emissions from EfW plants, and called for the government to halt further development until better regulation is in place.