When dawn broke on 1st January 1996 it gave way to a day which by the standards of English weather in mid-winter was pleasant and almost spring-like. The Managing Director of Onyx Hampshire and his transport controller took up a position in the controller's office, not knowing what to expect. This was the first day of a new contract with Hampshire County Council and the two cities of Portsmouth and Southampton. Nothing much happened that day – after all, it was New Year's Day and a Monday - but it was a day that revolutionised waste management in the UK.

The Hampshire waste management contract, known as Project Integra, became the showcase for what was known as integrated waste management in the UK, arguably across Europe, and possibly the world. It combined receipt and sorting of recyclables, composting of green and organic waste, combustion and energy recovery of residual waste, and the servicing and management of civic amenity sites right across the county. Today it is the norm, but then it was new, and exciting and had never been done before in the UK.

It didn’t stop there, however. Built around this contract was a public/private partnership which stands even today to be one of the best examples in the UK of local authorities working with one another and with the private sector to achieve change. The synergy that resulted from the 14 local authorities involved working with Onyx (today known as Veolia) propelled Hampshire and the two cities to the top of the league table of recycling performance in the UK, as well as showing that recycling and incineration can live very well side by side. Today, it has lost much of its lustre simply because other authorities and companies have caught up and even surpassed it in terms of recycling performance - but these authorities have stood on the shoulders of this giant. 

So, what led up to this change and what did it lead to? This short three-part history will try to answer that. By necessity it will be just an overview, but it will help to explain and hopefully put into context some of the things we see today in waste management in this country.

Let’s go back in time – EfW in the UK can be traced back to the late 19th century when the country faced growing concerns about waste accumulation and public health. The first incinerators, known as “destructors,” were introduced in the 1870s to tackle urban waste problems, but with little or no energy recovery. The first recorded waste-to-energy plant in the UK was built in 1896 in Nottingham, and there is photographic evidence of Tyseley charging vehicle batteries in the early 1900s. However, concern over air pollution meant that landfill disposal remained the dominant waste management method that lasted throughout the 20th century. 

By the 1980s, the UK hosted some 32 municipal solid waste (MSW) incinerators, most of which just burnt waste to convert it to ash, saving space in the landfills as ash has a much higher density than raw waste and enabled more waste to be packed into the same volume. The first large-scale EfW plant was established in 1962 in Edmonton, capable of supplying both power and district heating, but further progress was slow. The, in 1975, Coventry replaced an earlier facility, but still without the ability to power or heat. Little was known at the time about dioxins and furans, and some of the operating parameters of these plants were causing large quantities of these pollutants to be emitted into the air. This gave incineration a stigma that remains with modern EfW to this day – even though they are now minor emitters.

The first EfW built in the UK to what we recognise as modern-day emission standards was South East London Combined Heat & Power (SELCHP), which was commissioned in 1993. Although supported by local authorities, this was a private development sponsored by what today is Veolia and the erstwhile CNIM, the technology supplier. However, despite its name, there was power but no heat. SELCHP was designed to meet emission regulations that were in law, but not yet enacted.

Following years of severe smog in the big cities – particularly London - caused largely by the burning of coal, the Clean Air Act was first introduced in 1956 and progressively strengthened in 1968 and 1993. The Environmental Protection Act 1990 established a framework for environmental regulation, including air quality standards, which also had a major impact on waste disposal (i.e. landfill and incineration) in that it effectively required these activities to be competitively tendered, resulting ultimately in a shift from being run by local authorities into private sector companies. Driven by the UK joining the European Communities in 1973 and progressive pressure on it to stop being “the dirty man of Europe”, the 1995 Environment Act introduced the concept of Air Quality Management Areas (AQMA) and set emission limits that changed the whole sector. By November 1996, all but a handful of the incinerators were closed, never to open their doors again. Also introduced in 1996 was Landfill Tax, applying a tax of £7 per tonne for active waste and £2 per tonne for inert materials. 

Recognising that landfills would have to be reduced, in 1991, Hampshire County Council (HCC) opted for burning their waste. For many years it had used incineration as a component of its waste disposal system and saw incineration, coupled with landfill as the prime means of disposing of the then 650,000 tonnes of household waste generated annually by the 1.6 million population. A 350,000 tpa EfW plant was proposed to be built in Portsmouth with the waste hauled by road from across the county. In the event, considerable resistance to this plan built up and in the end planning permission was declined, and with it, Hampshire’s policy on waste collapsed.

This and the continued use of the 4 old incinerators at Marchwood, Chineham, Havant and Otterbourne, near Winchester, allowed objectors to accuse the County Council of wanting to "burn everything" whilst poisoning the host communities with excessive emissions – a true accusation. These plants had only electrostatic precipitators as the means of flue gas treatment. Often not very effective, it meant that a significant proportion of particulate entrained in the gas stream escaped via the stack, resulting in deposits on nearby washing, windows, cars, etc., and did nothing to address other pollutants, including PFAs, PAHs, dioxins, etc. The local environment was toxic in more ways than one.

To comply with the Environmental Pollution Act, Hampshire County Council let an 18-month contract to transfer the operation of the incinerators and landfill sites to the private sector, won by a subsidiary of what today is Veolia. It started to rethink its strategy, incorporating evolving thinking around sustainability and the waste management hierarchy, reflecting European policy thinking on waste. 
In June 1987, the World Commission on Environmental and Development (WCED) published its report, now commonly known as the Brundtland Report, after its chairperson. It was not the start of thinking on sustainability, but it marked a maturity and established a structured approach to the subject. This led to the 1992 United Nations Rio Earth Summit and sustainability started to be reflected in many programmes around the world (known as Agenda 21), represented by the meme “Think Globally, Act Locally". This all started to influence thinking on waste management, but it was very conceptual, and a decade later, not much had happened in practice.

It was from this background of stagnation in waste management policy that Hampshire County Council came out with a revolutionary tender enquiry for a private sector “partner” to propose and implement a waste management strategy for the County and the cities of Portsmouth and Southampton. This became Project Integra and evolved rapidly into a collaborative partnership involving Hampshire County Council, two city councils (Portsmouth and Southampton), eleven district and borough councils, and Veolia Environmental Services UK in the form of Hampshire Waste Services. The primary aim was to create a sustainable and integrated waste management system that would minimise environmental impact while being cost-effective and reliable with recycling, not incineration at its heart. Its foundation was the waste management hierarchy, and the approach was to introduce waste prevention programmes, encourage re-use, recycle as much as possible, and use incineration with energy recovery to reduce the quantity of residual waste sent to landfill. Whilst landfill was still a part of the solution, the plan was to create additional space in Paulsgrove landfill, near Portsmouth, to buy time and then progressively fill all the landfills to their permitted levels and close them. The County’s 26 amenity sites (renamed Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs)) were brought under coordinated administration (although run by different contractors); a network of transfer stations was built to allow the transfer and onward transportation of recyclables and residual waste to their respective places for treatment; 2 MRFs were built to segregate comingles recyclable collections - replacing one previously established in the tipping hall of the old Portsmouth incinerator; and the old incinerators were replaced with three new EfW facilities.

The programme went ahead with great success. It is not possible to tell the whole story here, but Project Integra won accolades from the Government, was applauded across the country and even made the international stage, appearing at the United Nations in New York. It became a “Beacon” authority under a government scheme that gave benefits to the better performing authorities. Surely others would follow, and sustainable waste management establish itself throughout the land. But when Big Ben chimed to ring in the new year of 2000, recycling across the rest of the UK was just 12% and 26 million tonnes of waste was still going to landfill. Hampshire had heralded in a golden age, but the gold had soon tarnished.

How would the UK make the shift away from landfill? How did energy from waste become the established means of treating residual waste? What were LATS and ROCs? Read Part 2 for the next stage of the story.