The Inner Moray Firth has emerged as the preferred location for a new facility to process Highland region’s waste.
Planning officers are exploring options for a site to deal with the mind-blowing 83,000 tonnes of waste generated annually in the Highlands and currently sent to landfill at a cost of £80 per tonne.
By law, councils won’t be able to bury municipal waste, mostly from households, in landfill sites from January 2021.
With the ban announced in 2012, Highland Council has – by its own admission – been late in facing up to its future waste management strategy.
Since January, council officers have been working on options which include the construction of a £7million Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in the Inner Moray Firth area to recover recyclates and produce Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF). These products would be transported to end-users in England or mainland Europe.
This facility is projected not to be ready until 2022, so interim contracts would be issued to third parties to deal with the waste until then.
Longer term, the proposal is to construct an Energy from Waste (EfW) facility on the same site. This would supply heat locally at an extra construction cost of £88million. From planning to operation, it would take an estimated seven years to get up and running.
Environment, Development and Infrastructure chairman Allan Henderson told his committee: “We’ve been remiss in not moving forward and here’s our opportunity especially if you look at the money we’re wasting by using landfill at £80 per tonne.
“I also welcome the twenty to thirty jobs which will be created by the new facility.
“We’ve got the money in the capital budget to take us to the MRF option, and we then become masters of our own destiny with what happens with our actual waste.”
Head of Environment and Amenity Services, Andy Summers said: “We’re not going to fall off a cliff in 2021, we’ve started to renew contracts and get them in place to find a home for our waste.
“The waste market is extremely volatile with China imposing its ‘green wall’.
Highland Council already processes all our material in the UK, but more and more local authorities will be looking to do that, so the situation will be volatile going forward.”
Mr Summers added a work of caution about the MRF project.
He said: “Planning is the biggest risk to this project. We need to get it right from the start rather than deal with a protracted planning issue later in the day.”
He said the search for a site in the Inner Moray Firth would be complete by June.
“The site location is a question of proximity to where the most waste is generated,” he added.