Getting rid of Norfolk's residual waste is costing more than £20m a year, including a bill of nearly £4m to burn rubbish at an incinerator in Suffolk, new figures have revealed.

But campaigners who battled to stop an incinerator in Norfolk today insisted they were right to fight for the contract for the controversial plant to be ripped up, despite the costly bills.

And leading councillors said they were looking at a longer-term solution to deal with the 200,000 tonnes of unrecyclable waste produced by households each year.

When Norfolk County Council announced it wanted to build an incinerator at Saddlebow, near King's Lynn, they said the £500m project would save £250m a year over a quarter of a century, compared with rubbish being sent to landfill.

But, with a £169m private finance grant from the government withdrawn and delays to the project drastically reducing the savings, councillors decided in 2014 to pull the plug. That left the council with a £34m bill, including compensation to contractors Cory Wheelabrator.

However, residual waste – which cannot be recycled, re-used or composted – has to go somewhere and new figures have shown how much it costs to dispose of it.

The council has, since 2014, been sending 40,000 tonnes a year to an incinerator which was built at Great Blakenham in Ipswich.

That costs about £3.8m a year, with the contract extended to 2020. A further 160,000 tonnes of waste is dealt with by council contractors FCC, Frimstone and Seneca.

They treat waste at plants in Costessey, Wisbech and Rackheath to process it into a fuel which is exported to combined heat and power facilities in Europe, including Germany and the Netherlands.

That costs £68m over four years, although the county council says it saves £2m a year compared to sending it to landfill.

Martin Wilby, Conservative chairman of the council's environment, development and transport committee, said the authority was looking at alternative technologies to deal with waste.

He said: 'We have got a good four to five year buffer, which gives us time to evaluate if new technologies in other parts of the country work.'

And Toby Coke, leader of the UKIP group at County Hall, a key figure in the fight to axe the incinerator, said: 'What we are paying is still a lot cheaper than it would have been for the incinerator. The incinerator was only ever viable with the PFI money and once that was gone, that was it.

'Opposing it was absolutely the right thing to do.

'Now we have the chance to work towards alternative solutions to dealing with waste and that's why we need to keep the site at Saddlebow – because that could be needed for technology in the future.

'But I don't get the people who fear that could be used for an incinerator. The council would be barking mad to try that again.'

And Mr Wilby agreed that the idea of Norfolk having an incinerator was 'gone'.