Making Rubbish Work

We are working in partnership with North Yorkshire County Council to deliver a Joint Waste Strategy to deal with the area’s rubbish for the next 25 years. Further details are to be found on the Waste Strategy page of the partnership's website. Part of delivering the waste strategy is to treat residual waste (the rubbish which remains after reduce, reuse and recycle activities have taken place) and recover value from it. The Councils are working together to obtain a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) solution to achieve this.

What happens now?

The residents of York are amongst the best recyclers in the country, but even after reuse, recycle and reduction activities have taken place there is still some household waste that has to be treated.

At the moment York sends around 75,000 tonnes of residual waste to landfill every year. But this cannot continue in the long term, these sites are filling up rapidly and new government targets coupled with our own environmental strategies require that we find alternative, and sustainable, solutions. We also need to ensure we can recover value from waste.

A long term solution

In 2007 the councils invited waste management companies to tender for a long term contract to manage the final treatment of York and North Yorkshire’s residual household waste. Prior to this, the councils had worked together to prepare an Outline Business Case (OBC) which was submitted to Defra and other partner organisations. This document reflected the region’s waste management position at that time and has been further developed to become the basis of our successful bid for PFI credits. If you would like to read the OBC, this can be found on the Waste Private Finance Initiative page on NYCC's website

The closing date for receipt of initial outline solutions was December 2007 and in January 2008 a shortlist was produced. The councils are now in discussions with these companies, in a process called 'competitive dialogue'. This process is designed to make sure that all parties fully understand each other’s requirements to avoid costly delays and misunderstandings.

The companies will then submit their final bids and the councils will evaluate them. The final stage will be the selection of a preferred bidder who will make any necessary planning and permitting application.