Cost of building new Edmonton incinerator rises by over 40% amid delays

The project was originally due to be completed last year but will not now be ready to burn the borough’s rubbish before December 2029, reports Sebastian Mann, Local Democracy Reporter

Constrcution of Edmonton incinerator is progressing slowly (credit NLWA)

The cost of the long-delayed new Edmonton incinerator has ballooned to £1.25billion.

The 14 councillors sitting on the North London Waste Authority (NLWA) – now led by a Green Party chair – agreed new terms with contractor Acciona at a quarterly board meeting held this week.

The authority’s decision raises the cost cap on the mega construction project from £885million to £1.25bn, representing a rise of 41%. A completion date of December 2029 is now pencilled in – four years later than planned when work began in 2022.

NLWA is responsible for disposing of waste from around two million residents across seven boroughs; Enfield, Haringey, Barnet, Camden, Hackney, Islington and Waltham Forest.

Around £700m has already been spent on the so-called ‘energy recovery facility’ at Edmonton Eco Park, which was first approved in 2017 but has since attracted significant opposition from environmental groups.

Groups such as Stop the Edmonton Incinerator Now (StEIN) have expressed concerns the new, larger incinerator could increase demand for waste across the area and release harmful particles into the air, despite reassurances from the NLWA.

Earlier this month, the Greens members of NLWA said in a joint statement they backed the new incinerator despite years of opposition, after “inheriting a poisoned chalice”.

NLWA chief Jacob Cable, a councillor in Hackney, said this week: “At this late stage in construction and taking all the facts into consideration, we have come to the decision that it is in the public interest for the facility to be finished and for the new terms to be agreed.

“Cancelling the project at this stage would impose significantly greater costs on the boroughs.”

Cllr Cable added: “Members have ensured that the new agreement is robust and binding, with the contractor fully accountable for the delivery and commissioning of the facility. This has been reinforced by in-depth reviews carried out by independent expert advisers as well as auditing of Acciona’s performance, which has led to increased governance and oversight.

“Most importantly, the incinerator will be publicly owned and income earned from the generation of energy will continue to help reduce costs for council taxpayers. There will never be a situation in North London where our boroughs are locked into a contract with a private provider which forces us to supply waste for burning.”

The authority says there has been a significant improvement in productivity recently, with more than 400 skilled workers on Edmonton construction site every day compared to 200 at the beginning of this year.

If the project had been cancelled, the NLWA says it would have cost the boroughs an additional £100m a year by 2030/31.

This would have included repayments on existing loans, paying private operators to either incinerate or put the rubbish in landfill elsewhere. It would have also meant about 30,000 extra lorry journeys undertaken each year to transport rubbish to those sites.

Meanwhile, Cllr Cable said that he had recently written to request funding support for emerging green technologies.

“Following our decision to complete the ERF [incinerator], NLWA members will be pushing for significant systemic change to ensure that unsustainable waste and rubbish are reduced as much as possible,” he said.

“This includes ensuring that far less plastic ends up being incinerated. We call on this government to act and urgently ban more unnecessary, tricky-to-recycle plastic.”

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