Waste collection in North East England is haphazard, inefficient and bad for the environment. Kerbside collection is dominated by a profit-driven private sector. We can change this.
How did we get here?
Privatisation, of course, and the determination of Margaret Thatcher to weaken public sector unions. The result was the infamous 1988 Local Government Act and the 1989 Water Act. The Prime Minister had been radicalised by a since-discredited ideology that the private sector would always give best value.
Compulsory Competitive Tendering
Municipal domestic waste was a prime target for the Thatcherite idealogues, via the medium of Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT). One by one, local councils, which had managed domestic waste efficiently and cheaply, succumbed to CCT as private companies undercut their workers’ pay and terms of employment.
The fraud of privatisation
The debacle within the water industry debunked the dangerous and expensive myth of ‘private sector good’ once and for all. As a result of the Water Act, public services had been outsourced to private companies such as Thames Water. At this company, the end result was that £15bn of private sector debt was outsourced back to the public sector.
A licence to print money
Privatisation has created a layer of pure profit to be skimmed by a handful of millionaires. In the water industry alone, £3bn a year disappears into this black hole. The waste industry has a similar, but even more lucrative structure. In Teesside for example, commercial waste has generated a personal wealth for people such as Neil Elliott and Peter Stephenson that puts them close to billionaire status.
A dangerous game
And they operate in an arena where the regulator, the Environment Agency (EA), is toothless. It oversees an industry where health and safety legislation is routinely disregarded, for example here and here. Extreme pollution events occur with monotonous regularity, for example here and here. Working at these places is dangerous and can often prove fatal, as happened at two separate Ward Brothers Recycling plants within just over a year. This one in South Bank in 2019, followed by this one in Hartlepool a year later.
So what’s the solution?
Well, for commercial waste operators, we need to pass legislation that will revamp the EA and make it fit for purpose. For domestic waste operators, we need something more radical.
Change the status quo
Local councils are responsible for collecting and disposing of rubbish. But that hasn’t been strictly true of late. In 2020, the Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA)’s Teesworks project was going nowhere. Local mayor Ben Houchen created a partnership of seven local authorities (LAs) in order to build a new incinerator, to be known as the Tees Valley Energy Recovery Facility (TVERF). The TVERF would have a construction budget of £300mn, and would tie LAs into payments exceeding £2bn, and possibly approaching £3bn.
Not to mention the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS)
Incinerators have another hidden cost. This is the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which is designed to tax carbon polluters. The ETS is due to be expanded to include incinerators in 2028. Each tonne of waste burned generates a tonne of CO2. The ETS is expected to cost each of the above LAs an extra £3mn per year.
Don’t do it
Although the TVERF is proposed to be built in Grangetown, within Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council (RCBC). Ben Houchen inexplicably selected someone from the other side of the river Tees to manage it. Hartlepool Borough Council Managing Director Denise McGuckin, an old ally of Houchen’s, topped the selection list of candidates. The list contained only one candidate, so job interviews weren’t required. RCBC granted planning permission to TVERF in 2021.
Do we live in a democracy?
An operator, Viridor, has been selected for TVERF, but there will still be opportunities for RCBC to change this. A special meeting has been scheduled for 13 May 2025 after a previous council decision was derailed. We saw back in January the lengths that RCBC will go to in order to ram through unpopular decisions, and this can’t be allowed to happen again.
A future beyond incineration
So, assuming that TVERF meets its deserved fate, how do we move forward? The creation of the TVERF partnership has created a useful precedent. We now have a template for how we can move in the opposite direction from a polluting incinerator, and create a circular economy that works for everyone.
A new partnership
In place of the discredited TVERF consortium, a partnership between the North East Combined Authority (NECA) and the TVCA. This partnership would take over waste collection and disposal from the 12 constituent unitary councils throughout the North East. It would be a 100% public body to be known as North East Waste Recycling (NEWR)
Who would fund NEWR?
NEWR would be funded via a precept from the 12 constituent local authorities. However, the cost would be mitigated by the sale of high-quality recyclables. More on this later.
Kerbside collections
Kerbside collections would continue as at present. However, these would come under the ownership of unitary authorities as private contracts lapsed. In other words, a return to a system that worked perfectly well prior to 1988.
Bin collections – a “3-bin” system
Householders would keep three bins as follows:
- Dry Mixed Recyclables (DMRs) – paper, card, glass, metal cans.
- Food waste
- ‘Black Bag’ (non recyclable) waste
Collection schedules would vary according to the type of waste collected. Food waste would be collected weekly. DMR and black bag collection would be fortnightly or every week, as recycling levels improve. Householders with large gardens would be provided with a fourth option for garden waste. This collection would be chargeable, although individual local authorities could choose to subsidise this.
Where would the rubbish go?
Black Bag waste would continue to be taken to the two incinerators at Haverton Hill, near Billingham in Teesside. DMR and food waste would be taken to one of four dedicated Materials Recovery Facilities (MRFs) throughout the North East. There would be four of these, located as follows:
- Grangetown. To be built instead of the TVERF. To serve Redcar & Cleveland, Middlesbrough, Stockton, and Hartlepool unitary authorities.
- Darlington. To serve the borough, and the west of County Durham.
- Seaham. At the existing waste disposal site, to serve the east of County Durham, Sunderland and South Tyneside.
- Newcastle. To serve the city of Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside and Northumberland.
What is a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF)?
An MRF is a facility for the recovery and recycling of dry mixed recyclables. Modern MRFs, such as this one at Sherbourne near Coventry, utilise specialist AI technology to process DMR in the most sustainable and efficient way possible. Sherbourne is considered to be the best-practice MRF operator. It would act as a model for the new MRFs in our region. As a side note, the operator of the site welcomes delegations from local authorities to see how it functions.
Thin population
Sherbourne serves a population of 1.5mn in eight local authorities. However, it has the advantage of serving a compact, densely populated area. The North East, on the other hand, is relatively thinly populated. Therefore the four MRFs proposed for this region would serve only 750,000 people on average.
How much do MRFs cost?
Due to their advanced technology, MRFs are not cheap. But the construction costs are only about one fifth of the cost of an incinerator such as TVERF. And the savings may be considerably more. Research by Community R4C in March 2025 has revealed the disturbing costs of the Javelin incinerator in South Gloucestershire. Instead of saving £100 million over its lifetime, as the local authority claimed, it has already cost taxpayers £42 million more than landfill over its first five years.
How would the MRFs handle food waste?
Each MRF would have a neighbouring anaerobic digester. So what’s one of those? An anaerobic digester is an airtight container. Food waste and microbes are added, and the food is broken down. The end-products of anaerobic digestion are biogas/biomethane and fertiliser.
Where there’s muck, there’s brass
So each MRF/food digester would generate three valuable end-products for onward sale. Gas products and fertiliser as described above, plus high-quality recyclables such as metal cans, glass and paper. These would represent a significant offset against the cost of running the centres.
Continuing use of landfill
Darlington and Newcastle local authorities would continue to landfill their non-recyclable waste. However, further capacity will become available at local incinerators as overall volumes decrease, and this option would need to be considered.
Decreasing volumes
The amount of waste being sent to both incinerators and landfills would be reduced immediately due to the following:
- State-of-the-art MRFs and food digesters, as described above.
It will continue to reduced as follows:
- Workplace recycling in England, introduced on 31 March 2025. Details here.
- Food waste recycling from all households will commence on 31 March 2026. This will reduce the tonnage being sent for landfill/incineration by 30%. Details here.
- A Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) will commence in October 2027. Details here.
Mommy, what is that man for?
The DRS was first announced by then environment secretary Michael Gove in 2018, but it has been delayed several times due to industry lobbying. The DRS will be transformative. A similar scheme introduced in Ireland in February 2024 resulted in the recovery of more than 1.2bn containers within the first year. If that success were to be repeated in the North East, it would result in 670mn containers per year being recycled instead of being burned or landfilled.
Continued use of the Haverton Hill Incinerators….
Five North East LAs are contracted to send their non recyclable waste to Haverton Hill, and will continue to do so regardless of whether the proposed TVERF is constructed. For the record, these authorities are: Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Gateshead, and Sunderland. If TVERF isn’t built, the other five LAs who currently send their non-recyclable waste to Haverton Hill will continue to do so. These LAs are Durham, Hartlepool, Stockton-on-Tees, Middlesbrough and Redcar and Cleveland.
….but reduced use as NEWR does it’s stuff
The next stage will be for NEWR to negotiate short-term 5-year contracts with the existing incinerators as volumes continue to decrease. The new contracts won’t stipulate minimal volumes of waste, a perverse incentive that is currently driving recycling rates down.
Increased recycling rates
The changes indicated above would generate a significant improvement in recycling rates throughout the North East. The reduction in the amount of waste being sent to the Haverton Hill site would eventually allow the oldest incinerator, built in 1998, to be closed within the next decade.
The science bit
The existing incineration capacity at Haverton Hill would also be enhanced to significantly reduce pollution. This would include Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) to ensure that waste is burned using the best available techniques (BAT). You can read about SCR here and BAT here.
The future – landfill versus incinerators
Landfill gained a bad reputation over a number of years. This was mainly due to poor practice by unscrupulous private operators. Landfill problems have included leaks of liquid waste (leachate) into the neighbouring land, odours caused by dumping of food waste, and insufficient remediation of land when the landfill has ceased operation. All of these faults can be avoided with good landfill management.
Dig deep
For example, if we’ve got some unrecyclable plastic, we can landfill it instead of burning it. The plastic would be placed in a very deep, well-managed landfill. It would take centuries to break down, instead of being zapped in seconds in an incinerator. Then, in perhaps a few decades time, we’ll have developed more reliable technology to recycle these materials, and we’ll be able to excavate them.
Landfill Tax
Landfill Tax was introduced in the UK to discourage the practice, but it has since metamorphosed into another Treasury cash-cow. When it was introduced in 1996, the standard rate of Landfill Tax was £7 per tonne. Earlier this month, this rate increased to more than £126. Just as with minimum-volume contracts to supply waste to incinerators, the Landfill Tax has created another perverse incentive for LAs to turn to incineration. The UK Government has got to end this incentive by making high quality landfill schemes exempt from the tax.
Thanks to Paul Foster of Stop Incineration North East (SINE) for providing additional research
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