Orchid in Hong Kong as London plant dropped

Orchid Environmental appears to have dropped plans for a solid recovered fuel plant in Bexley, London and while still hoping to develop a plant in the UK, is also promoting its wasteprocessing and fuel recoverytechnology in South East Asia.

The company, which is a sister business to Fairport Engineering and based in Adlington, declined to comment to letsrecycle.com on the current circumstances surrounding its proposed 160,000 tonnes per annum Bexley facility.

In April 2011, the London Waste & Recycling Board announced that it had agreed to provide a 4 million loan to help develop the Orchid plant in Bexley. But, it is now understood that LWARB has dropped the project from its list of activities. At the time, Steve Whatmore, managing director of Orchid Environmental Ltd said: We welcome LWARB’s fantastic demonstration of support for Orchids planned London facility and the recognition of the positive contribution this third Orchid merchant plant will make to London’s carbon agenda”.

However, while the company has talked of three plants, Orchid is believed to have only ever developed one facility rather than three in the UK and this was under the governments demonstrator project programme. The plant, at Huyton, Liverpool was closed in 2011, three years after opening with 5.6 million of funding from Defra. The Huyton facility suffered a fire and was closed for part of its demonstrator operational time.

Orchid also announced plans in 2011 for a facility in Shotton, north Wales although this is not thought yet to have been built (see letsrecycle.com story).

Operational

Speaking in Hong Kong last week in a seminar on waste management and recycling at the Eco Expo Asia trade fair, Orchids brand development director Alistair Starkie, gave the impression that the Huyton facility was still operational.

Referring to pictures of the Huyton plant, he said: We have a demonstration facility in the UK this is some of the material we treat. It presents its own challenges in terms of composition and the material readily entangles itself The strength of this technology is that it is able to treat a mixture of materials. Our objective is to heat treat and let the organic fraction fall away from the materials which can make a useful fuel.

Mr Starkie also revealed to delegates that the amount of energy used is very small compared to the amount of energy that can be used from the fuel.

The brand development director explained to delegates that the performance of the Huyton facility had improved when it switched to using more commercial and industrial material rather than taking waste from the municipal stream.

And, he told them that there is a clear opportunity here to create a fuel from your waste arisings. You have a very similar set of quantities arising except for the organics fraction in Hong Kong.

Time

Speaking after the event to letsrecycle.com, Mr Starkie explained that he had not had time to tell the audience that the plant had closed because the organisers had asked him to keep strictly to time but that the analysis he had given was marked as being from 2008-2011.

He confirmed that the company was still looking at a project in the UK but would not elaborate further.