The £8 million plant, which has been developed under a joint venture with Dundee-based Energen Biogas, has been unveiled on the same day as the company also officially opened its new £6 million, 150,000 tonnes-a-year capacity materials recycling facility (MRF) at Blochairn, in Glasgow.
The Cumbernauld anaerobic digestion (AD) facility will have the capacity to process 60,000 tonnes-a-year of food waste, generating 22,000 megawatt hours of renewable energy enough to power more than 3,000 homes.
It is intended to be used to treat food waste from both commercial and local authority customers, and the firm is already sending material there from the likes of Glasgow Airport, Strathclyde University and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde.
The facility operates as the treatment destination for waste collected under the firms commercial food waste collection service which was launched in Glasgow and Edinburgh earlier this year (see letsrecycle.com story), and Shanks expects it to be operating at full capacity within the next 12 months.
MRF
The MRF has been developed on the site of Shanks existing operations at Blochairn, which included an older MRF and a waste transfer station. The newly-developed facility is accepting material from local authority customers such as North Lanarkshire and East Dunbartonshire, as well as commercial and industrial customers.
It has been designed to achieve a 95% recovery rate from non-segregated general waste as well as to effectively sort commingled recyclate to extract the maximum amount of material for reprocessing, including cardboard, paper, aluminium, glass, wood and metals. The remaining waste will be converted into solid recovered fuel (SRF) for heat and power.
Ian Goodfellow, Shanks UK managing director said: At Shanks, we are continually investing in recycling and recovery technology to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill and incineration.
Scotlands vision where all waste is seen as a resource is one we are firmly aligned with and we are very pleased that with the opening of these new plants we can contribute to making a zero-waste Scotland a reality.
Energen Biogas
Shanks originally unveiled its plans to develop the Cumbernauld AD facility alongside Energen Biogas in October 2009 (see letsrecycle.com story), and its joint-venture partner said the plant could herald many more using AD technology in Scotland.
Robert Etherson, operations director at Energen Biogas, said: AD plants, such as this in Cumbernauld, provide a fantastic opportunity to grow the renewables industry in Scotland and improve resource efficiency. I believe we really are at the forefront of a revolution in sustainable waste management in Scotland where AD technology will play an increasingly large role.
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