It’s probably my own fault but I am rather confused by the proposals to deal with all our Bradford household waste over the next few years and in the decades to come.

As I understand it, a long-term contract for 25 years, starting in 2015, will soon be awarded to one of two consortia, Earth Tech Skanska or 3SE (Shanks & Scottish and Southern Energy).

The first one will do mechanical sorting to increase recycling, then treat the organic matter to produce gas, with the rest going to be burned in an energy-from-waste system to provide electricity.

The other one will do some sorting for recycling, then compost the green stuff and then send the rest to a large new energy-from-waste plant that is to be built near Ferrybridge.

Until the above decision is taken and the plants built, our current waste needs to be diverted from landfill to avoid fines and increasing costs. So the Council has decided to award five separate short-term contracts for the household waste that could be extended until 2017. Unfortunately, the details of the plans have yet to be announced by the Council.

To complicate matters, planning permission has recently been granted to Bio-Gen, an energy-from-waste company, to build the world’s largest (160,000 tonne) gasification facility on the old Solaglas site on Ripley Road. But it’s not clear to me where that fits in, as the waste it would need already seems to be committed to other routes.

My confusion isn’t helped by the fact that the future plans involve co-operation with Calderdale, for economies of scale, yet both councils have different collection systems at the moment. In Bradford, limited recycling is collected monthly and the normal waste each week, whereas in Calderdale, food waste and plastic bottles are collected weekly, with the normal waste every two weeks with either paper or glass.

I am particularly interested in the food waste and I do hope that Bradford collects it separately, like Calderdale and another 50 or so councils in the country, as it has considerable potential and there is far too much of it.

Left in landfill, the eight million tonnes a year is responsible for more than 20 million tonnes of CO2, and that is just careless.

Treated properly, it can be fed to animals to replace imported soya from cleared tropical forest areas, or, as in Germany and Bedfordshire, it can go into anaerobic digesters to produce methane for the general gas supply or to produce electricity. It is better than sewage for this purpose, as the latter has already been through our stomach digesters, diverting some of the gas.