Tomato firm looks to use heat from SITA EfW

The planning application has been submitted to Suffolk county council by Sterling Suffolk, the company behind the project, for two commercial greenhouses on land next to the B1113 between Great Blakenham and Bramford.

The greenhouses would cover an area of nearly 50 acres and would produce 7,500tonnes of tomatoes a year.

If the application is successful, heat from the 269,000 tonne-a-year capacity EfW facility at Great Blakenham near Ipswich would be supplied to the greenhouses. The EfW plant is being built under a 25-year, 1 billion PFI-funded waste management contract withSuffolk county council (see letsrecycle.com story)

Giving an update on the EfW facility, a spokeswoman for SITA UK said: We are at the end of the second year of build so commissioning will start in the New Year and we are due to receive the first load of waste in June and be fully operational by the end of the year.

Demand

The council has previously sought a customer for the heat from the facility after voicing concerns that there may not be sufficient demand for it due to restrictions relating to customer locations and their demand for heat (see letsrecycle.com story).

The spokeswoman added: The big issue is finding the customer for the heat and that is why a lot of effort has gone into this particular project which would give us a base load. But we need a constant demand for the heat. A few houses nearby is not enough so we need a greenhouse project to kick start it…If it goes well, potentially we can look at a district heating scheme but we have to get the base demand for the heat first.

Tomatoes

Michael Blakenham, from Sterling Suffolk, said: The glasshouses will provide the base load for developing a district heating system. In addition the reduction in food miles, the ability to grow all-year-round British quality tomatoes and to utilise substantial quantities of heat, that would otherwise have been wasted, first attracted me to the project.

Sterling Suffolk said the greenhouses would create over 200 jobs and turn Suffolk into one of the countrys largest tomato producers. Currently one in every six tomatoes eaten in the UK is grown in the UK the rest are imported.

The project has the backing of The Greenery, one of the main distributers buying and selling salad produce throughout the UK and Europe.

If the project is given approval, work could start next summer and the first British tomatoes from Sterling Suffolk could be on retailers shelves by mid-2015.