Defra has awarded £310 million of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) credits to four local authority waste management projects that aim to divert over a million tonnes of waste from landfill.

The PFI credits were awarded to the Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham Partnership (£77.4 million), Bradford Metropolitan District Council (£62.1 million), Suffolk County Council (£102 million) and Leeds City Council (£68.6 million).

Each of the four councils receiving funding will aim to reduce the overall amount of waste created and reach 50% recycling rates by 2020, with some aspiring to reach 60%.

Environment minister, Joan Ruddock said: “These are ambitious yet realistic projects which have risen to the challenge of supporting the whole waste hierarchy.”

Leeds City Council said it is looking into various treatment technologies to deal with the waste that is not recycled but that “a decision has not yet been made about which treatment process will be used”.

Councillor Steve Smith, executive board member for environmental services at Leeds, said: “Given the advances in waste treatment technologies we feel that a decision on the actual solution should not be taken until after the evaluation of all potential solutions brought forward during the procurement process.”

The council anticipates that the facility construction and commissioning will take place between 2011 and 2014 and could be operational by April 2014.

Suffolk County Council has said that it favours Energy from Waste (EfW) as it is “a good environmental choice, is the cheapest option and we know it can work for Suffolk”.

This also follows a survey conducted on behalf of the Suffolk Waste Partnership that suggests 63% of Suffolk residents surveyed believed that thermal waste treatment could “work well in Suffolk as it has done for other countries in Europe”.

The council announced in January that its highways maintenance depot in Great Blakenham will be the potential site for a waste processing facility.

Bryn Griffiths, assistant director for the environment, said: “EfW is our preferred solution for waste for Suffolk, but we are open minded about other technologies if a tender comes forward with an alternative solution.”

However Bradford said that although it welcomed the funding, it still only represents a small part of the overall cost of waste management.

Ian Bairstow, head of waste management at Bradford Council, said: “This funding to support the long term solution is good news, although it still only represents a very small proportion of the increasing cost of waste management.”

It is expected that each authority will issue a notice to prospective bidders in the Official Journal of European Union (OJEU) soon.