The materials recycling facility (MRF) – known as The Forge – cost £10 million to develop and will initially sort up to 250,000 tonnes-a-year of materials such as paper, cardboard, plastics, brick rubble, concrete, soils, glass and plasterboard.
Lawrence – which began in 1984 as a skip hire firm – has a licence to sort up to 500,000 tonnes of material at The Forge facility and intends to serve businesses from the West Midlands area.
David Lawrence, managing director of Lawrence Recycling and Waste Management, hailed the opening as a “significant development” and said: “What we have created is Europe's largest covered recycling facility. It is made up of four bays and in bay one you could fit the Titanic.”
The Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has worked with Lawrence since 2007 to help find the company feed stocks of material in order to develop The Forge. The client base now includes construction firms such as Thomas Vale, Bowmer & Kirkland and Spellar Metcalfe, as well as initiatives such as Wyre Forest Community Housing.
The government-funded body intends to work with Lawrence in the coming months to fill “skills gaps” by helping them to find an interim production manager to help set-up manufacturing processes and quality controls at the Forge facility.
Dr Liz Goodwin, chief executive of WRAP and guest of honour at the opening, said: “[The Forge] is going to create jobs crucial for the local economy in the current economic climate and it is encouraging to see innovations still happening in an important area of recycling and materials recovery.”
The Forge
Lawrence said it was currently “tweaking” aspects of the facility to ensure it could sort as much material as possible and had already highlighted the need to acquire a baler to enable it to sell plastic material.
The company is currently talking with companies supplying material to The Forge about the possibility of separating dry materials – such as brick rubble and plasterboard – from wet material such as organic waste to improve the quality of material arriving at the site.
In addition, Lawrence said it would be working closely with local carpet manufacturers to ensure carpet was separated from other material as much as possible and it had also attended events in the carpet recycling sector to attempt to gauge outputs for the material.
Development of The Forge was aided by £10 million in funding from a range of banks and investment firms in February 2009 (see letsrecycle.com story) and was visited by Conservative Party leader David Cameron during its construction (see letrecycle.com story.
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