Norris visits 160m Lakeside incinerator

His tour of the site, which has been developed as a joint-venture by waste management companies Grundon and Viridor, came just a day after the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, visited BiogenGreenfinch's anaerobic digestion facility at Westwood in Northamptonshire to see how food waste can be turned into energy.

Mr Norris was shown how the Lakeside facility is being used to turn up to 410,000 tonnes of residual household and business waste a year into 37 megawatts (MW) of electricity, the majority of which is exported to the National Grid.

And, he highlighted the importance role that the facility, which was officially handed over to Grundon and Viridor in January 2010 (see letsrecycle.com story), had to play in dealing with waste.

“Reducing, reusing of recycling is our first priority but it's not possible for some types of material – which is where facilities like this come in,” he said.

“By providing power for tens of thousands of homes through energy from waste incineration, this is yet another example of seeing waste as a resource rather than something that should just be thrown away,” he added.

His sentiments were echoed by Grundon's Richard Skehens, a director of the Lakeside EFW Ltd company set up to operate the facility, who also welcomed the minister's decision to visit the plant.

“We are pleased that the Minister had seen the essential and important role that Lakeside and other energy from waste facilities can play working alongside high levels of recycling to improve resource efficiency in the UK,” he said.

“These facilities successfully deploy safe, robust and efficient technology and provide good value for money for our customers, which is important in the current economic climate,” he added.

Benn

Meanwhile, environment secretary Hilary Benn yesterday (March 22) visited BiogenGreenfinch's anaerobic digestion (AD) facility at Westwood in Northamptonshire.

His visit to the plant, which has the capacity to process up to 45,000 tonnes of food waste a year, was aimed at learning more about how food waste from households, businesses and schools can be diverted from landfill and turned into both energy and a digestate for use as fertiliser.

It came just days after Mr Benn launched a consultation on potential landfill bans for materials including food waste by emphasising the potential for recovering energy from the waste stream using AD technology (see letsrecycle.com story).