A £500M contract involving incineration aims to slash the amount of waste Cornwall landfills by 90% over the next 30 years.
Councillors this week voted in favour to award the contract to French firm Sita – creating Sita Cornwall.
The contract would see an energy-from-waste plant built, six new household waste-recycling centres, seven redeveloped facilities to increase recycling, six refuse-transfer stations and five composting facilities.
Just one-fifth of the county’s waste go to landfill compared with 72% today under the terms of the new contract, which includes a requirement for the contractor to recycle all separated waste collected by district and borough councils.
There is also an aspirational target of at least 60% recycling across all of the recycling centres in the county, with the contractor penalised for achieving less than 50%. Executive councillor for environment, Councillor Adam Paynter, claimed it was ‘an excellent deal’.
However, Cornwall’s five Liberal Democrat MPs are pressing ministers for a full public inquiry into the incinerator plans. One of the them, Andrew George, MP for St Ives, said: ‘We appreciate an inquiry is likely to be costly.
‘But it is important we have an opportunity to test many of the assumptions behind this particular solution and to test the resolve of the Government to favour the type of energy-from-waste technology.’