Fire hits Viridors Merseyside WEEE plant

The fire, which occurred at 00.30 am at the St Helens-based plant previously owned by M Baker Ltd caused damage to the building and machinery and comes almost exactly one month after another Viridor-managed recycling centre in Crawley was heavily damaged by fire.

The blaze, was contained by 10 fire service crews and took around three and a half hours to extinguish. There were no injuries according to Viridor despite a full recycling shift team being on the Parr Industrial Estate site at the time of the incident.

A full investigation into the cause of the fire will now be carried out with initial assessments already taking place.

Contingency

Viridor has insisted that there will be no disruption to its regular service, with the implementation of a contingency plan to shift operations to Viridor Electrical Recycling's plant in Perth.

Malcolm Todd, VER director said: “I would like to thank the emergency services and our own employees for their swift, professional and effective response to this incident. We will be carrying out a detailed investigation to establish the cause of the fire.

“CRT [cathode ray tube] recycling and other operations at St Helens are unaffected. Our fridge recycling services will be diverted to our Perth operations ensuring no disruption to our customers,” he added.

However, one industry observer told letsrecycle.com that transporting WEEE to Perth would increase costs substantially. As an alternative, he suggested that other WEEE sites with additional capacity might look to handle the WEEE and that the development could impact on the sector. This is because Viridor is a major contractor to Electrolink which is the largest compliance scheme in terms of access to WEEE from civic amenity sites.

The M Baker facility had been purchased by Perth-based Shore Recycling following administration proceedings, who in turn was acquired by Viridor in March for a deal worth £23m. (see letsrecycle.com story)