The plant received an £8.5 million finance facility from HSBC. Eco Sustainable Solutions has used an equipment finance facility to develop the plant, plus invoice finance and a term loan to facilitate further growth. The project has created two full time jobs.
The plant, which is sited at the company’s facility in Parley, is capable of burning around 10,000 tonnes of oversized material from the company’s composting operation.
Eco’s Parley operation annually processes 150,000 tonnes of material including green waste composting and wood waste processing.
Parley
Eco Sustainable Solutions said that power generated from the biomass plant will be used for the Parley site with any excess fed into the national grid.
Trelawney Dampney, Eco’s managing director, said: “HSBC, and particularly our relationship director Andy Lear have been instrumental in getting this project off the ground, and the flexible mix of invoice and asset finance has meant we’ve been able to complete the work in a really timely manner.
“This new biomass plant is testament to Eco’s belief that the future relies heavily on renewable energy, so we will continue to grow and diversify our operations and look forward to working with HSBC again to help these ambitions become a reality.”
Anthony Reed, HSBC’s area director for Hampshire & Dorset, commented: “HSBC was brought on by Eco Sustainable Solutions because of our knowledge and expertise in the renewables industry, plus our ability to put the funding in place in stages which allowed the business to pay for the plant’s components before delivery. With this phase of the project now complete we have put an additional £3m facility in place to help the business continue to grow.”
Biogas
The company already operates a £3.3m biogas plant at a site in Piddlehinton.
The anaerobic digestion (AD) plant, opened in 2012, supplies energy and gas to Mole Valley Farmers’ Feed Mill in Dorchester. The plant consists of a reception barn, generator container, digester and two storage tanks.
The AD plant takes in up to 15,000 tonnes of organic waste annually and up to 6,000 tonnes of pig slurry to create methane gas. The gas is then used to generate up to 498 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity, with end products being used as agricultural fertiliser on local farms.
Eco Sustainable Solutions was founded in 1993 as a composting company, and now handles 340,000 tonnes of organic material each year across four facilities.
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