UK anaerobic digestion gate fees and the Hanford-Stoke dispute

A gate fee is the price per tonne that a waste owner, usually a council, pays a treatment plant to accept waste. Councils in the United Kingdom send separately collected food and garden waste to anaerobic digestion (AD) plants, which turn it into biogas and digestate, and send residual waste to energy-from-waste (EfW) plants, landfill or other routes.

In a July 2026 compilation of UK gate fees, the median AD gate fee was £13 per tonne, with ten fees negative. The same compilation gave £66 for in-vessel composting, £34 for landfill plus a landfill tax of £126.15, and £182 for EfW. The record states that the AD median fell from £24 to £13 per tonne, and that new AD contracts starting in April 2022 had a median of -£15 per tonne. In 2025/26, 12 councils had zero or negative gate fees.

The sources reviewed show the income of AD plants moving away from the gate fee. A 2003–04 model of the Holsworthy plant put the gate fee at 20–27% of revenue and electricity at 73–80%, and its authors wrote that electricity and heat sales alone were not enough. An operator of the Greenfinch plant said its gate fee income was 675 thousand against 300 thousand from electricity, about 69% of revenue. The sources record that, as fees fell, revenue at new plants shifted to energy and subsidy, and that the Green Gas Support Scheme was extended to 2028.

The other side of a long waste contract is a put-or-pay clause, under which a council pays for a minimum tonnage whether or not it delivers it. letsrecycle reported that the operator of an energy-from-waste facility at Hanford asked Stoke-on-Trent City Council for about £650,000 because it sent less waste than contracted. The record notes that councils in the Belfast area (arc21) committed 80% of their estimated residual waste under such terms.