Speaking as she opened a new materials recycling facility in Rainham, Essex, the Secretary of State for the Environment said: “Facilities like this plant are the tangible signs of a quiet revolution beginning in waste management in this country.”
The site, owned and operated by Cleanaway, works in partnership with the London Borough of Havering. It has been developed in response to the shortage of landfill capacity in Essex and the need to find new waste management strategies in keeping with the Government’s waste strategy.
Targets
The reduction in waste going to landfill from Havering will help the borough to meet the targets of the Essex Waste Plan, the UK Waste Strategy and the Landfill Directive. The plant also takes recyclable waste from other parts of London, Essex, Kent and further afield, including Hampshire. It is running at 56% of its capacity at the moment, but aims to be running at 100% by the end of the year.
Cleanaway claims the plant is the “most technologically advanced” MRF in the UK. In a statement, Gerben Westra, Cleanaway chief executive, said: “We have pulled together our wide experience of working internationally to build this MRF and we believe it features the best design and innovations for materials recycling.”
The biggest of its kind in the South East, the MRF cost 4 million to build, split between construction by Jackson Building Ltd of Ipswich and equipment supplied by Sutco Recycling GmbH of Germany. It can process up to 50,000 tonnes of dry recyclables per year and currently processes plastic, paper, card, steel and aluminium. In future it may also deal with textiles, CDs and CD cases.
Partnership
Mrs Beckett said: “I hope this partnership is a sign of things to come across Britain. We have to do more thinking about where we want to be in the future, how we will get there and what parts each of us will play. These are major challenges, but there are also rewards.”
She highlighted the importance of initiatives that were economically as well as environmentally sound, saying that it was vital that sustainable practices can pay their way if they are to be adopted. “We can’t just say the government will pay for it all – because ultimately, we are all paying for it.”
But Mrs Beckett emphasized that new practices were vital to meeting targets. “We still landfill more than almost all other member states in the EU,” she said. “Changing that means major changes in behaviour as well as changes in investment. People’s own experience of waste will change radically over the next few years.”
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