The North Wales Residual Waste Treatment Project (NWRWTP) brings together five councils: Flintshire; Isle of Anglesey; Conwy; Denbighshire and Gwynedd. Working together they are purchasing a service from the waste industry that will provide a tailored solution to treat the waste that has been left over after as much as possible has been recycled.
This is known as residual waste.
In North Wales we have traditionally buried our residual waste in landfill sites. Landfilling produces gases that are harmful to the environment. A mixture of Methane and Carbon Dioxide called biogas is released. These are greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change and damage our planet. Methane is 21 times more polluting than carbon dioxide. We are also running out of landfill sites in North Wales, It is estimated that there is approximately 5 years of landfill capacity left in North Wales. The Welsh Government (WG) has set targets for the amount of rubbish that can be sent to landfill.

In North Wales we are recycling about half of our household rubbish and by 2025 we need to be recycling 70%. There will be a significant amount of residual waste produced by households in the area covered by this project when this 70% recycling target is achieved. 

What are we going to do now?

We need to plan how to treat this residual waste and while it may seem a long time from now we need to act now. We need to procure a solution and these types of procurement processes take a few years to complete. The solution we decide upon must meet the needs of the communities in the five authorities and provide benefits to North Wales. This important project needs your opinions and we want you to be part of it.

What’s happened so far?
In order to secure additional funds from the Welsh Government (WG), the NWRWTP put together an Outline Business Case (OBC). This OBC identified an Energy from Waste Plant situated on Deeside Industrial Park as an example technology and site to illustrate to WG how much funding was required. This OBC, produced for WG, was purely a document to secure funding from WAG and for the NWRWTP to understand what a potential solution might cost. It does not tie the partnership to any technology or any site. WAG has pledged £142 million pounds to the project over its life, so now the NWRWTP can start looking for a treatment solution.

The NWRWTP needs to procure a solution from the waste management industry and has started talking to the industry about what is needed. To find out what was important to people across the five local authorities we have held a series of workshops to identify what people’s key priorities are. These workshops were held with councillors, community groups, a range of important national organisations and specialist groups such as Snowdonia National Park and Friends of the Earth. These group workshops have helped us to understand what important priorities need to be when assessing the bids that will be submitted. The priorities were fed into the evaluation framework that is being used to assess the solutions proposed by the waste management industry and which of these solutions is purchased eventually.  

What happens next?

Our “where are we now” and “timeline” pages on this site show you how the project will progress. The NWRWTP will buy a service from the waste management industry that will require them to provide a complete solution. This may mean building technologies and operating facilities. The procurement process follows clear guidelines and the NWRWTP has begun by publishing an OJEU notice and holding a bidder’s day that invited interested companies to know more about the project. The NWRWTP needs to know that interested companies have the experience and financial standing to cope with a project that will run for 25 years, so it had asked companies to complete a pre-qualification exercise. This has begun and companies that are successful will be invited to tender for the work.

The tender process will involve a series of stages where proposals will be refined from each of the bidders in a dialogue process. At each of the stages companies will be deselected from the process until a preferred bidder is selected. It is important that the waste management industry understand what the NWRWTP wants the solution to achieve and the evaluation criteria being produced will provide this and be a tool to assess companies’ proposals.

The Partnership have now received submissions from the three remaining participants in the procurement process that will enable the Partnership to consider if rail could form part of a future solution.  The Joint Committee is meeting in March 2012 to consider this specific item.