IT’S back to the drawing board for Scottish Borders Council in its bid to come up with a plan to meet stringent Scottish Government timescales on drastically cutting the amount of waste going to landfill and hitting recycling targets.

“We are basically starting with a blank sheet of paper,” conceded Councillor Michelle Ballantyne, leader of the Conservative opposition group, at last week’s full council meeting.

Under Scottish waste regulations, a ban on all biodegradable waste going to landfill will come into effect in January, 2021.

And the Scottish Government’s Zero Waste plan demands that 70% of all waste is recycled by 2025.

In February, the council controversially cancelled a contract with a firm called New Earth Solutions (NES) to build and operate an advanced thermal treatment (ATT) at Easter Langlee near Galashiels.

The council had originally signed a deal with the company in 2011 to turn the region’s dumped waste into compost-like material using a microbiological process.

That facility was due to be up and running by 2014, but in October, 2012, the council met in private and agreed to radically amend the contract to include the gas-generating, incinerator-based ATT system.

A report to councillors last week conceded that SBC’s Integrated Waste Management (IWM) policy, adopted in December 2013 and heralding the end of kerbside garden waste collections, was structured around the NES contract – cancelled because the technology was untried and the firm had failed to attract the necessary private investment.

As a first step to coming up with a replacement waste management plan, the council, which is writing off the £2m it spent on the abortive NES contract, agreed on Thursday to appoint a so-called member-officer reference group (MORG) to oversee a solution.

Five councillors – David Paterson (Ind, executive member for environmental services), Joan Campbell (SNP), Graham Garvie (Lib Dem), Gordon Edgar (Ind) and Simon Mountford (Con) – will sit on the group which will meet monthly and consider a range of service elements, including kerbside collections, waste treatment/disposal and bulk/transfer haulage.

The group will doubtless be interested in the annual landfill figures which the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) will publish in September for 2014/15 – the first full year since the garden waste uplifts for 38,000 urban households were scrapped.

Asked if the group would revisit the issue of kerbside green bin collections, Jenni Craig, director of neighbourhood services who will chair the MORG meetings, told us: “At this stage everything relating to waste management is under consideration in the development of the plan”.

Councillor Ballantyne told Thursday’s meeting: “The whole issue of this council’s waste management policy is very confusing and our constituents struggle to make sense of it. We must ensure the public is fully engaged and informed as this plan progresses.” Despite the impending deadlines, no timescale has been set for completion and implementation of the plan, with waste manager Ross Sharp-Den observing: “Waste policy, regulations and targets continue to evolve over time and this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future.

“There may be merit in allowing the market…to stabilise prior to the council making any significant long-term investment in waste treatment contracts.” Although the reports which informed the expensive decision in 2012 to procure the ATT remain secret, the minute of last month’s meeting of SBC’s Audit & Risk Committee suggests the council was aware at the time of “all risks” relating to the NES contract.

SBC’s external auditor KPMG is due to offer its assessment of the failed NES procurement when it publishes its 2014/15 audit in September.