A growing stink at Essex’s £800m waste plant

As much as a third of Essex’s household waste is being processed in breach of planning regulations – meaning more of it is going into landfill instead of being recycled.

Essex County Council (ECC) has confirmed it has been investigating complaints about operations at the Tovi Eco Park, in Courtauld Road, Basildon, which opened in 2014 to process all black bag rubbish and items disposed at Household Waste Recycling Centres across Essex and Southend.

The huge waste plant – one of the biggest of its kind in Europe – was built at an estimated cost of £800million.

At the time, Essex County Council stated that the rationale for the plant was to reduce the amount of waste going into landfill (which was reaching unsustainable levels), increase levels of recycling and to convert remaining waste into solid recovered fuel, which can be used to generate heat and electricity.

With that aim in mind, Essex County Council granted permission to operator Urbaser Balfour Beatty (UBB) in December 2012 for “mechanical and biological treatment” (MBT) to take place at Courtauld Road.

UBB runs the waste processing service on the council’s behalf under a £100million private financial initiative (PFI) contract agreed in 2012.

What’s the problem?

At this point, things get a bit technical, but put simply, the contract and planning permission states the waste will go through MBT’s three-stage process:

• Pre-processing – where the recyclable materials are extracted and the large items are shredded
• Biodegredation – where everything remaining after the recyclable material is removed gets processed to reduce its mass and moisture (meaning it will take up less space if it needs to go to landfill)
• Refining – a further process to remove more recyclable material

Once this is all done, whatever is left is taken away as either solid recovered fuel (for use as energy) or stabilised output material (for landfill).

Simple enough in theory, but then in November 2017, ECC discovered UBB were ignoring the planning terms and doing something different with a significant amount of the waste.

Instead, UBB is using a process known as “QRSF production” for a significant amount of waste arriving at Courtauld Road, which ECC thinks could be in excess of 32 per cent.
QRSF skips most of the stages of treatment involved in MBT, meaning there’s less recyclable material recovered and the mass of the waste that needs to go to landfill is greater.

For the last few months, UBB and ECC’s waste disposal team have been arguing about just how much this matters.

In a letter dated November 16, ECC executive director Margaret Lee urged her colleagues in the waste planning team to “investigate the matter and take all appropriate action to remedy this ongoing breach of planning control” to stop QRSF, stating UBB has been breaching planning regulations since July 2015.

What happens now?

There’s no mention at all of QRSF in the planning permission granted for Courtauld Road, so UBB would seem bang to rights in terms of breaching its conditions.

While ECC’s waste disposal team is accusing UBB of wrongdoing and demanding action is taken against them, it is up to the council’s waste planning team to investigate and recommend what to do now.

Head of planning Richard Greaves has compiled a report for next Friday’s meeting of ECC’s development and regulation committee, and its finding are, frankly, inconclusive.
UBB and the waste disposal team continue to disagree on exactly what the impact of QRSF is and, as a result, the figures estimating how much extra waste could be recovered if the process was stopped are wildly different depending on who you listen to.

UBB says the bulky waste and recycling centre waste it currently puts through QRSF would only reduce in mass by about 1% if it went through MBT’s stabilisation process, while the waste disposal department thinks it could be as high as 10%.

Therefore the amount of extra material going into landfill each year could be anywhere between 750 tonnes and 7,500 tonnes.

Mr Greaves, who states “there is considerable technical evidence and figures that continue to be disputed”, ultimately warns against harsh action being taken against UBB.

Startlingly, despite the reduction in landfill being one of the main reasons for building the £800million plant in the first place, Mr Greaves states that the extra waste being put into landfill as a result of the breach is not cause for concern.

He says: “It is not considered that there is any conflict with the policies of the adopted Essex and Southend Waste Plan (July 2017) in respect of this issue. There is no planning policy requirement, for example, to ‘reduce the mass and volume of waste’ after collection.”

If such a seemingly vital thing as this goes completely unmentioned in the waste plan, it makes you wonder what its purpose is at all.

In conclusion, Mr Greaves goes as far as to state that “no material harm has been identified from the breach” and merely recommends that UBB submits a retrospective planning application which will allow it to continue to carry out QSRF.

He says “it is not considered expedient to take enforcement action to remedy the identified breach of planning control.”

If councillors vote in favour of the recommendations at Friday’s meeting, UBB will face no punishment despite breaching planning rules for more than two-and-a-half years, which has resulted in thousands of extra tonnes of waste going into landfill.

Growing problems

This is not the first time UBB has come under fire for activity at the plant. In February 2017, asbestos was discovered at the site, which led to a temporary ban on council refuse workers being allowed to drive into the site.

And in broader terms, UBB is way behind schedule in its expansion of operations at Courtauld Road. It opened initially in 2014 for a “commissioning phase” which should have seen it handling all household waste in Essex and Southend’s council area during 2015.

In June 2017, though, it was reported UBB and ECC were heading to court, with ongoing delays meaning the council had been forced to take out an extra contract to treat 255,000 tonnes of waste that UBB were unable to.

Things are going far from smoothly.