The London borough of Sutton has signed a contract with waste firm Viridor to build the “Dano Drum” plant at Beddingtone Lane.
” This facility will add to our existing recycling facility and composting plant meaning that substantial amounts of waste will be diverted to other uses.“
– Cllr Colin Hall, LB Sutton
The facility will use a combination of mechanical separation techniques and composting to divert waste from landfill. Using technology provided by Belgium company KeppelSeghers, the plant is expected to be operating by September 2006.
Sutton is leading the project, which has secured 2 million from Defra via the London Recycling Fund, but the 110,000 tonne-capacity plant will also treat residual waste from the boroughs of Croydon, Merton and Kingston-upon-Thames.
The plant is being designed to divert about 36% of input material from landfill. In Sutton, the plant will take material from household brown bins, and the borough believes the new system will add 10 percentage points to its recycling rate, which was 28% in 2004/05.
Colin Hall, lead councillor for the environment, said: “This facility will add to our existing recycling facility and composting plant meaning that substantial amounts of waste will be diverted to other uses.”
Technology
Of the waste going into the new plant, Viridor said it would recover 4% metals, 14% would be lost as moisture through the composting process, 18% would become “useable compost” and 18% as stabilised material to be used as landfill cover.
The plant works by passing mixed waste through a 24 metre-long horizontal drum, which breaks up the materials and then screens it to take out larger pieces. Metals are recovered with a magnetic separator while organic material is composted over 12 to 14 days in two sets of enclosed tunnels, with air blown through the material.
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The in-vessel composting tunnels are to a design developed by Viridor and consultants Pell Frischmann, and will comply with legal standards for treating animal by-products.
At the end of the composting process, material will be screened with half the material – that containing plastic and metal fragments – to be used as landfill cover and half the material to go through further maturation before use as a compost in soil remediation and restoration projects.
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