Bottom ash recycling plant approved for South Yorks

Sheffield city council has granted planning permission to Lincolnshire-based Ballast Phoenix to build the plant on the 45-acre Beeley Wood recycling site off the M1 in South Yorkshire, where Ballast has a 28-year lease. The plant is intended to produce 40,000 tonnes-a-year of Incinerator Bottom Ash Aggreate (IBAA) each year.

The plant will take material from Veolia's incinerator, which burns 240,000 tonnes of residual waste material each year as part of the French-owned company's 35-year integrated waste management contract with Sheffield city council.

The decision comes just four months after the Treasury unveiled proposals to hike up the rate of landfill tax paid on materials such as bottom ash from the lower rate for inert material to the higher rate – creating a huge incentive to recycle the material (see letsrecycle.com story).

The Beeley Wood site is being developed as a ‘recycling village' by property company Loxley Land and Property.

Under the IBA recycling process, the metals are removed from the ash and the small percentage of raw material that is unusable. The remaining material is screened into varying size fractions of IBAA. This can then be used in construction projects.

Martin Simpson, managing director at Veolia in Sheffield, said: “We welcome the partnership with Ballast Phoenix and are pleased that the Bottom Ash will soon be recycled and transformed to be used in a vast array of building projects across the UK.”

Civil engineering and infrastructure work is set to be undertaken by Hartlepool-based Zeneca Developments in the forthcoming weeks, with a proposed operational date of late 2009. A spokeswoman for Ballast told letsrecycle.com that the capital costs of developing the facility were commercially confidential.

Ballast currently operates five IBA reprocessing facilities across the UK and has also supplied 70,000 tonnes of IBA aggregates to the Olympic Park project in East London ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games.

Andrew Smith, general manager for Ballast Phoenix, continued: “Ballast Phoenix has worked successfully with Veolia Environmental Services on a number of initiatives across the country and we are pleased to have another opportunity to work together again recycling the Bottom Ash generated by the Sheffield Energy Recovery Facility. Around 20 different sites in South Yorkshire were considered for the recycling facility.”