Port investment to handle woodchips from Dorset
The company has installed a 2,500 square metre pad in the port's Western Dock under an arrangement with Eco, which will see Solent Stevedores handle over 100,000 tonnes of wood chip over the next three years. The wood chip is being diverted away from landfill and shipped to Sweden to be used as a power generation source and in paper mills. Eco has previously shipped wood chippings to biomass facilities Germany in order to find a sustainable output for the material (see letsrecycle.com story).
Peter Hardy, sales manager at Eco, said: “We're delighted with the way this contract is progressing. The investment by Solent Stevedores is a very welcome development.”
WRG awarded £13m Herts waste transfer contract
Hertfordshire county council has awarded Northampton-based Waste Recycling Group a £13 million, seven-year contract to manage its Waterdale waste transfer station near Watford.
The transfer station receives around 180,000 tonnes per year of kerbside collected municipal solid waste from six local authorities in Hertfordshire. Waste accepted at the site will be bulked up using four refurbished static compactors and placed into compaction ejection trailers. The waste will be sent to disposal points designated by Hertfordshire county council, including WRG's landfill sites at Bletchley, near Milton Keynes, and Stewartby, near Bedford. Under the contract, WRG also aims to assist Hertfordshire in reducing its environmental impact, which will include the use of compaction ejection trailers. This is intended to result in a higher payload per trailer and reduce the amount of vehicle movements.
Gordon Fergus, commercial manager at WRG, said: “We are delighted to secure this contract with Hertfordshire County Council and we look forward to working with them in providing an important waste management service that also helps to meet the council's carbon reduction objectives.”
Battery recycling company hails £1.2m contract win
The company, which was set up in the summer of 2009, won deals with breakdown company RAC and car parts firm Euro Car Parts in August 2010 and began rolling out recycling services for them across the UK six weeks ago. It said the successes meant it now has a 10-12% market share for collecting lead acid batteries, as well as making the introduction of nationwide coverage for its services, which involve batteries being collected by a fleet of 19 vehicles, then bulked up and taken to its recycling facility at Immingham, in the North East, where they are broken up and materials such as lead and plastics are recovered. And, it is also looking to expand its work with local authorities, having secured a contract to collect batteries from Sheffield city council's waste contractor, Veolia.
Workshop Recycling managing director, Mike Taylor, explained that the company was targeting garages and other sources of lead acid batteries who weren't aware of the requirements of waste management legislation and the need to keep them out of landfill. And, in terms of its growth potential, he said: “We're doing around 1,000 tonnes a month of lead acid batteries and we're looking to double that in the next six to 12 months.”
Derbyshire blocks Cyclamax gasification proposal
Derbyshire county council has refused planning permission for a £35 million, gasification-led resource park in Chesterfield proposed by Monmouthshire-based renewable energy firm Cyclamax.
At a five hour meeting of the council's planning commitee earlier this week (October 19), councillors debated the proposal which included a 60,000 tonnes-a-year capacity gasification plant as well as a 20,000 tonnes-a-year capacity materials recycling facility (MRF). The facility was conceived as the first of seven Cyclamax is seeking to develop across the UK (see letsrecycle.com story). The project was refused for four reasons cited by the councillors: unacceptable highways impact; loss of protected trees; adverse impact on local economy; and, perception of health risk.
A spokesman for Cyclamax told letsrecycle.com: “We have just got to wait for the decision document which should come out in the next couple of weeks and see what the official reasons are. They write them out in greater detail than they explain on the night, so we will take a look at that and see where we go from that and we have got six months to lodge and appeal if we want to go down that route.”
Central London district targets zero commercial waste to landfill
The initiaitve, which is a business improvement district (BID), aims to create a system of ‘waste monogamy', which will see just one provider managing each waste stream for all the businesses who sign up. There are currently 550 member businesses within the commercial district of inmidtown's BID boundaries and all have been invited to join the scheme, which inmidtown claims could reduce costs of waste management with 90% of office waste being collected for free from participating businesses. inmidtown hopes the Zero to Landfill initiative will serve as a model for other districts to help achieve the targets set by the London Waste and Recyling Board to reduce waste to landfill.
Tass Mavrogordato, chief executive of inmidtown, said: “We introduced a free mixed recycling collection service for Holborn two years ago, which saw 1,000 tonnes of waste recycled in the past year – saving businesses around £200,000 – but now we want to take it further. The urgent demand for businesses to cut costs, along with recent government legislation aimed at making the private sector more accountable for their carbon footprint, led us to develop the Zero to Landfill scheme.”
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