Row over £1m cost to run Stratford’s bin lorries on green fuel
A PLAN to run Stratford district’s refuse collection lorries on an alternative fuel has been slammed as a waste of a £1 million.
When the lorries arrive in your road later this year, they could be running on hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) as part of measures to go green and cut carbon emissions.
But HVO comes at an additional cost to the diesel currently used to power Stratford District Council’s fleet of lorries. That cost has been estimated at almost £200,000 a year, although £250,000 will be set aside in the council’s budget to allow for fluctuations in the price of the fuel.
Liberal Democrat cabinet members will need to decide on Monday (15th January) whether to pick up the tab of going green or to look at alternatives for offsetting the lorries’ pollution.
A council report re-states SDC’s ambition to be a net zero carbon council by 2025. That would require a reduction in the level of greenhouse gas emissions created by the council, of which the refuse lorries are a large contributor.
However, the leader of the Conservative opposition at SDC, Cllr Sarah Whalley-Hoggins (Brailes & Compton) described the plan as “greenwashing at its most terrifying”.
Cllr Whalley-Hoggins said. “The Lib Dem proposals will see £1 million of SDC council tax being spent on this green nonsense over their remaining term in office. Vehicles of the type used by SDC, with their Euro 6 engines, are perfectly acceptable across clean air zones in inner cities, including London, precisely because the pollution from such vehicles is minimal compared to other lorries.
“The Lib Dems green agenda and their poorly thought-out vanity projects will bankrupt councils across the country and the residents of Stratford really do need better management of their hard-earned money.
“The proposed benefits laid out by the Lib Dems is ‘greenwashing’ at its most terrifying.
“The impact of manufacturing and distributing HVO currently does far more harm to the environment than using a fleet of up-to-date vehicles with much cleaner engines.
“Common sense must prevail in all green initiatives and proposals. Unsurprisingly common sense, just like HVO fuel itself, seems to be in short supply with these HVO proposals.”
HVO is currently used in London – Hackney Council has been leading the way with the fuel and reported CO2 emissions savings of 80 per cent compared to diesel.
Data analysed for 2021-22 showed SDC’s carbon footprint to be 3,293 tonnes of CO2. Diesel from the refuse lorries accounted for a third of that – 1,147 tonnes of CO2.
However, the cabinet report adds: “The decarbonisation of the fleet is difficult for several reasons. These include limited scope for electrification, limited capacity within the electricity distribution network and significant barriers to adoption of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.”
In short, the technology out there is either too expensive or unsuitable for rural areas, leaving only a few options – one being is hydrotreated vegetable oil – if emissions are to be tackled.
Cllr Susan Juned, Lib Dem leader of the council, told the Herald: “The [fleet] may have modern engines but they are diesel. Transport in this district is the biggest source of carbon emissions. Around 45 per cent of local emissions comes from transport, which is much bigger than the national picture. So what do you do about it?”
HVO, Cllr Juned explained, can be a straight replacement for diesel and doesn’t need specialist storage equipment and no changes to the vehicles.
“The critical thing is that HVO is produced from waste,” she added.
While HVO can be produced from virgin vegetable oil, it is the fuel produced from the likes of used cooking oil and waste vegetable oils which SDC will look to source.
The move to HVO will, Cllr Juned said, only be likely to continue for the duration of the vehicles’ lifetime – when they need replacing then they would look for lorries capable of running on another type of fuel.
“It will be a stepping stone and the ideal will be to get vehicles that run on biomethane or electricity,” Cllr Juned said.
Negotiations with the council’s contractors have yet to start, but there is hope the cost may come down as Biffa will also be in a position where it must reduce its carbon footprint.
However, Cllr Juned added that the overall price of introducing HVO was relatively small when you considered the cost per bin collected over the course of the year. The cost could also be reduced by blending the fuel – another area to be examined.
While it has significantly lower carbon emissions and produces less nitrous oxide, HVO too comes with its problems – the Conservatives are concerned the supply is a niche market with little competition to push down prices.
The cabinet report acknowledges: “The use of HVO in all 28 of SDC’s [refuse lorries] would be a more expensive option than diesel. Quotes provided by Biffa, the council’s waste collection contractor, show that using HVO rather than diesel would cost approximately £196,400 per annum (in a highly fluctuating market with growing demand and supplier changes).”
That cost could be built into the council’s budget or funded through the climate change reserve, which contains about £1.2m. Should the fuel costs exceed £250,000 a year, SDC will consider reverting back to diesel, the report adds.
Another alternative is to carry on using diesel and instead offset – basically planting trees to compensate for the CO2 created by the lorries each year. But, as SDC acknowledges, this practice can be seen as ‘greenwashing’ and there has been some issues around the accuracy of offsetting projects.
The report concludes: “Considering that there are currently no viable alternatives to the use of diesel in SDC’s fleet, and the significant contribution that the fleet makes to the council’s overall carbon footprint, it is proposed that the council uses HVO as an alternative fuel.”
