AmeyCespa makes significant investment in MRF

Waste management firm AmeyCespa has secured planning permission for the facility, with construction work set to commence shortly. The plant is expected to be operational in December 2012, creating 21 jobs.

Technology

The facility will contain state-of-the-art sorting equipment to separate mixed materials, including overband magnets to extract steel cans, eddy current separators for aluminium cans, screening systems to remove glass and near infrared separators for different types of plastic and paper supplied by recycling manufacturers Masias Recycling SL. The facility will also include technology to separate out items such as Tetrapaks and plastic film.

Starting with an initial capacity of 60,000 tonnes of material per year, the MRF will sort South Cambridgeshire district councils recyclable waste, as well as mixed recyclable materials collected from local businesses. The facility will have the capacity to expand to 100,000 tonnes per year, which will allow it to take mixed recyclables from local councils and businesses.

AmeyCespa East account director Sarah Clover explained that the development of the MRF will build on the existing facilities the company already has in operation in Cambridgeshire. She said: This is an exciting new development for AmeyCespas Waterbeach site and complements our existing Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) Plant and In-vessel Composting Plant (IVC), which treat all of Cambridgeshires kerbside collected household organic and residual waste.

The new facility will increase the amount of material we are able to recycle locally, which has environmental and economic benefits for the local community.

AmeyCespa was unable to reveal the exact cost of the proposed MRF, but a spokeswoman told letsrecycle.com that the facility represented a significant investment for the company.

Expansion

AmeyCespa is a joint venture between services firm Amey and waste company Cespa, both of which are wholly-owned subsidiaries of Spanish company Ferrovial. It has increased its interest in the UK in recent years, purchasing Cambridgeshire-based Donarbon in September 2010 (see letsrecycle.com story), as well as being granted a 25-year waste contract to treat residual waste for North Yorkshire and City of York councils with an estimated 900 million later that year.

Under the deal, AmeyCespa has submitted plans for a proposed large-scale waste management facility in Allerton, West Yorkshire (see letsrecycle.com story) expected to treat up to 320,000 tonnes of waste per year.