Cheshire West and Chester Council has formally accepted FCC Waste Services (UK) Ltd (the operational company of FCC Environment) as the ‘preferred bidder’ for its residual waste treatment contract.

The council Executive met last Wednesday (6 November) to discuss approving an ‘officer recommendation’ to appoint FCC as the preferred bidder for the region’s new residual waste contract.

Under the new eight-year contract – starting in April 2014 – the council’s existing waste collection contractors would transport residual ‘black bin’ waste to ‘a new local delivery point’ (to be developed by FCC) at Ellesmere Port, north of Chester. Certain materials including ‘metal and undersized material’ would be separated out at the facility and the remaining waste shredded to produce a ‘refuse-derived fuel’.

The fuel would then be transported to the Ferrybridge energy-from-waste facility (EfW) currently under construction in Yorkshire. Here the refuse-derived fuel would be burned to generate electricity. The Ferrybridge facility, located near Wakefield, will be managed by Multi Fuel Energy, which is a joint venture between SSE plc and Wheelabrator Technologies Inc.

Although no details have yet been released about the FCC facility or its process capacity, it is expected that it will treat most of the council’s residual waste - around 67,000 tonnes a year.

No guaranteed tonnages

The decision to start the procurement process for a new provider of residual waste management services, and to replace the existing landfill contract provided by FCC, was made by the council in June 2012. Since that time, the number of possible providers had been narrowed down from nine to two: FCC Waste Services and Viridor Waste Management.

In recommending FCC Waste Services as the preferred bidder, Councillor Lynn Riley, Executive Member for Localities, pointed to the savings that would be made in comparison to alternative options (although the exact value of the contract was not disclosed). In response to concerns about sending the refuse derived fuel from Ellesmere Port to Ferryfield, Executive members were advised that it made more sense to make use of a facility under construction than to invest in building a more local one.

Riley also stressed that, under the terms of the new contract, attention would continue to focus on minimising the amount of waste that cannot be recycled. Speaking to Executive members, she said: “Some of the significant things here are that we are not now obligated to any guaranteed minimum tonnage clauses, which is a very good thing, and obviously keeps all of our attention on the fact that we are going to drive very, very hard to minimise any waste that is not capable of being recycled.”

Commenting on the proposal put forward by FCC Environment, Councillor Mike Jones said: “We are doing the processing and pretreatment of waste at Ellesmere Port at a new facility which I understand is going to create five jobs to start off with and, if they make it as a business, then hopefully up to 25 jobs. That’s just really great news for Ellesmere Port”.

An FCC Environment spokesperson said: “Naturally we are very pleased to be appointed as preferred bidder for the Cheshire West and Chester contract but there remains a tremendous amount of work to do until we can begin providing services to people of the region.

“We have developed a strong relationship with the authority during the dialogue phases and will be working hard to ensure we build on this over the coming weeks and months.”

The next stage for finalising the contract is for the award to be made unconditional. If approval is given by the Director of Localities, it is expected that a contractual agreement between the council and FCC will be reached by the new year.

Read the minutes of the Executive meeting.