Details of the decision are expected to be released this week by the Western Riverside Waste Authority which currently spends about 23 million a year on waste services. It has responsibility for waste disposal on behalf of four London boroughs: Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, Wandsworth and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which have a total of 800,000 residents.
Western Riverside currently has contracts with Cory and Cleanaway and both these companies provide a barge service to take waste to Essex.
All three bidders are thought to be proposing to meet the government’s recycling targets and are also including energy from waste plants. The plants could conflict with the views of the London Mayor Ken Livingstone who has responsibility for waste management but no duties to carry it out.
The Authority's operations utilise the River Thames as the main method of transport so that transport and disposal are achieved with a minimum of disruption and pollution on London's congested roads. The waste is currently delivered to the Authority's two solid waste transfer stations, at Smugglers Way in Wandsworth and Cringle Dock in Battersea.
Most of the waste is then compacted into ISO containers, loaded onto barges and transferred to the Cory Environmental Ltd. (Cory) landfill site located on the Thames Estuary at Mucking, Essex. This transport and disposal operation is currently let under contract to Cory. The contract in tandem with the Transfer Stations Management Contract is due to expire in October 2002. Some 99% of the Authority's revenue is spent on contract payments.
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