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Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire given £129 million boost to reduce landfill waste

   

INFORMATION BULLETIN

Ref: 129/09
Date: 12 June 2009

Effective waste management in the Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire areas were given a boost as a local waste management partnership was awarded £129.1 million worth of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) credits earlier this month.

Project Transform, a partnership project between the three local authorities, will help divert up to 427,000 tonnes of biodegradable municipal waste (BMW) from landfill per annum by 2020.

The project could see a reduction of approximately 34,500 tonnes of CO2 emissions, compared with the current scheme, equal to taking 10,800 cars off the road for a year. In addition, this project is expected to create more than 250 jobs during construction.

Each local authority involved is committed to long-term minimum recycling and composting rates of over 50 per cent by 2020.

NOTES TO EDITORS

  1. The notices to prospective bidders will be issued in the Official Journal of the European Union over the next month. The climate change impacts of the proposed technologies will be assessed during the procurement process.
  1. Over £2.5billion has been committed to 37 waste PFI projects to date, including this project, with an additional seven projects currently in the application process.
  1. The Comprehensive Spending Review 2007 provided Defra with additional funding through PFI. The overall level has increased from £280 million in 2007/08 to £600 million, before rising to £700 million over the following years, totaling £2 billion of further investment in waste infrastructure.
  1. Municipal waste management statistics for 2007/08 in England were published by Defra on 6 November 2008. The total amount of collected municipal waste has decreased from 29.1 million tonnes in 2006/07, to an estimated 28.5 million tonnes in 2007/08, a decrease of 2.2 per cent. The average annual change in municipal waste over the five years to 2007/08 was a decrease of 0.6 per cent.
  1. The UK has been set targets to reduce the amount of waste it sends to landfill under the EU Landfill Directive. The UK has a target to reduce the volume of biodegradable municipal waste sent to landfill to 75 per cent of the 1995 levels by 2010; 50 per cent by 2013; and 35 per cent by 2020.
  1. In the Waste Strategy for England 2007, Defra published new national waste targets. These include higher targets for recycling and composting of household waste to at least 40 per cent by 2010; 45 per cent by 2015; and 50 per cent by 2020.
  1. The figure for the number of cars equivalent is based on the assumption that the average car does 12,000 miles per annum, and, using the most recent UK CO2 tailpipe average of 164.9 gCO2 per km (in 2007), then annual UK average CO2 emissions in 2007 equals 3.184 tonnes CO2 per car per annum.

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Page published: 12 June 2009