A shortlist of four companies for a 25-year £400 million waste contract for Bradford and Calderdale will have been whittled down to one by this time next year.

An update on the management contract for dealing with both district’s household waste from 2015 has set out a timetable which would see the winning bidder being selected in December next year. It would then go to Bradford Council’s executive for a decision with the contract expected to be finalised by May 2011.

The four companies that are currently developing detailed proposals for how they plan to deal with rubbish produced by homes in the district are: Aire Valley Environmental, Earth Tech Skanska, Osiris and 3SE.

The proposals will be submitted in February and the companies are proposing to develop sites at either Bowling Back Lane in Bradford, or Esholt.

It is likely that the solution will involve at least two stages, first taking out the waste that can be recycled or composted and then subjecting the remainder to heat treatment, possibly using energy from waste treatment.

In a report to the Council’s environment and waste management improvement committee, waste project manager Jill Campbell states that the Council is asking bidders to provide solutions that are adaptable for “combined heat and power” where possible so that technology could be used in the future.

She writes: “Combined heat and power (CHP) is the utilisation of low and high grade heat available as water or steam in addition to electricity generated at a waste to energy plant.

“The development of CHP is necessarily a project that follows on from the election of the winning bidder and may take some years to develop.”

Earlier this year an interim five-year waste deal fell through leaving the Council to use its landfill allowances for disposing of waste until the long-term solution is running by 2015.

Until then there is expected to be a shortfall of allowances with the cost of buying up any spare capacity from other authorities under a trading scheme predicted to reach more than £13 million over the next six years.

The Council could face fines of £150 per tonne if it dumps more waste in landfill than its targets when strict penalties are introduced next year.

However, an agreement to pool allowances between West Yorkshire authorities is expected to be sufficient to cover this financial year and partly meet the next two years’ needs.

In the meantime the Council is trying to come up with a replacement landfill contract.

The committee meeting takes place at City Hall, Bradford, on Wednesday at 5.50pm.