How our waste is helping to fuel the fires of industry

By Ben Fitzgerald - 1 October 2018

CommunityBusiness

When we hurl the unwanted remains of last night’s pizza in the bin, how many of us stop to think about the journey that slice of congealed Sloppy Giuseppe will take as it joins the falling-apart flip-flop, the used nappy and the rotting aubergine? Ben Fitzgerald took a close-up look at Swindon's Solid Recovered Fuel plant to see how Swindon's domestic waste is put to good use.

Our waste collection system is one of the miracles of civilisation.

During a visit Swindon's Solid Recovered Fuel plant, it was eye-opening to see the detritus of life whizzing past on a conveyor belt - much of which could easily have been sorted at source. 

At the facility, which began operating in 2013, a small but dedicated team works in shifts 24-hours a day, seven days a week, to deal with the 86,000 tonnes of rubbish that is delivered by council waste collectors every year. 

The only such facility in Wiltshire, it transforms bags of rubbish into huge bales of dry combustible material that can be used as an alternative to fossil fuel. The blocks are then shipped out to Western European destinations, including Latvia, Portugal and Cyprus where they are used to fuel concrete plants. The bales are burned at extremely high temperatures - which brings emissions into line with European Union regulations.

At the start of the process, collected bags of rubbish are lifted by a mechanical grabber onto a conveyor belt where the rubbish runs past two different types of magnet - one for removing items containing ferrous metals and another for removing other types of metal such as aluminium. These metals have to be cleaned and sorted before they can be sold for scrap. It is then fed through a crusher and larger items are sieved out of the rubbish to be cycled back around the system before being loaded into what is effectively a large tumble dryer - removing most of the moisture (household waste is made up of an average of 47 per cent moisture) to increase its calorific value. And at the end of the process the dried waste is bailed in plastic wrap and loaded on lorries ready for export. The process takes half an hour from start to finish - with only four per cent of household waste destined for landfill.

Sean Magee, from Public Power Solutions Ltd explained: “It never ceases to amaze me what people put in their bins. 

"If they put in the wrong things, it can slow down the whole process. 

"One of the most difficult things we have to deal with is engine blocks which people just put in the rubbish without thinking. And the old VHS tapes, which unravel and can get tangled around the machinery and of course tin cans.”

He added that if people considered what they throw away on a daily basis, making more effort to sort at source, the entire process would be much more efficient. 

Council seeks your opinions

Swindon Borough Council is seeking views of residents help shape their draft waste strategy - which will be presented to cabinet on December 5. 

The council is hoping to meet EU legal targets which call for the UK to recycle at least half of household waste by 2020, 55 per cent by 2025 and 60 per cent by 2030.

Swindon’s recycling rate has fallen by 10 per cent over the last five years to 38 per cent and the draft Waste Strategy will set out the how the council plans to address this.

One of the proposals involves temporarily using the council’s solid recovered fuel plant (SRF) to turn Swindon’s plastics into fuel for export.  The plant, which is located at the Household Waste Recycling Centre in Cheney Manor industrial Estate, is the only one in the UK to turn household waste into fuel and help reduce landfill. It currently deals with all of Swindon’s black bin waste with only 4 per cent being sent to landfill. 

This measure would involve residents putting their plastic into their black bins or blue bags which could also encourage recycling of other materials aside from plastic because there would be less room in the domestic bins. When plastic recycling becomes more environmentally-friendly and cost effective, the reintroduction of a plastic collection service would be considered.

 

 

 

 

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