New recycling facility would be 'long process'

Building a potential new waste recycling facility in an under-served county would be a "long process" and may be slowed by local government reorganisation, a council meeting has heard.

Cambridge City Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council's recycling waste have been transported to Newry in Northern Ireland since March 2025.

It has been claimed the East of England has "weaknesses" in its waste infrastructure.

Ros Hathorn, chair of the county council's green and environment investment committee, told a meeting creating a new facility was "not as straightforward as just building an industrial unit, putting some kit in there and switching it on".

Cambridgeshire County Council was discussing the new strategy for RECAP, a partnership made up of all the local authorities in Cambridgeshire and the unitary authority of Peterborough.

In response to a public question, Hathorn said the authority had "discussed the possibility of working together on future provision for dry and mixed recyclate processing due to the high cost and other challenges of some market-based solutions in the last procurement".

She said the new strategy proposed researching "the options for how to structure any commercial arrangement, then a business case will need to be created which will look at the best solution, how to fund it and options for the location".

Hathorn said the work would be starting now "but this will be a long process and the timescales for the project are yet to be developed and agreed", adding "with the prospects of local government reorganisation, that has slowed down the prospects of any big project being started in the near future".

Green councillor Darren Green told the meeting that blue bin recycling from Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire was taken to Northern Ireland "just to be sorted and then is passed on to other locations throughout the UK or Europe for processing".

"So yes, I'm very encouraged to see that there is going to be an effort to change this. I think this council must do everything it can to change this."

Labour councillor Mike Black, referencing Northern Ireland, said "everybody can see that this looks ridiculous".

He added: "I don't like hearing local government review used as an excuse for doing nothing or delaying things."

Conservative Steve Tierney said: "It's not ideal to send things to Northern Ireland, I accept that and I'd like to see a change that changes that, but only if it's cost effective for the taxpayer.

"If this works out to be the cheapest way to do it for the taxpayer then I would carry on supporting doing it, for the simple reason that I don't think we need to be layering costs upon taxpayers for virtue projects."

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