The facility would be located at Veolia’s Faraday Drive household waste recycling centre (HWRC) in Bridgnorth.
Under the waste company’s plans, the site would be used to dismantle flat screen TVs and monitors from IT equipment, which the company claims are becoming a larger proportion of the WEEE stream as householder habits change.
Plasma and LCD flatscreen TV and monitors are handled differently to more traditional television sets, which contain cathode ray tubes (CRTs).
The project has been launched as part of a Veolia-run scheme aimed at giving staff members the opportunity to pitch ideas and request funding for a start-up business.
HWRC
A number of UK sites were considered for the project but Bridgnorth was chosen as the preferred site. The HWRC on Faraday Drive is run by the waste firm as part of its 27-year PFI contract with Shropshire council.
Veolia has submitted a planning application to the local authority, which owns the disused space where it hopes to build the facility.
If approved, the site is expected to be running by autumn 2016 and could provide jobs for up to 50 people on a two-shift system. A recruitment day to find members of staff to join Veolia will also take place.
At a recent briefing with local councillors, Steve Mitchell, director for Veolia, said: “If our planning application is successful, this will be a major boost for employment in the local area and we hope to be able to encourage local people to come and work with us, on this innovative new project. This is a real opportunity to get involved in an exciting new project.”
Householders in Bridgnorth are also due to receive a new food waste collection service once planning has been approved for an in-vessel composting facility in the area. It comes as part of a wider overhaul of recycling services in Shropshire in 2016, with separate collections of dry recyclables to be replaced with a twin-stream system, and the return of kerbside cardboard recycling to the county (see letsrecycle.com story).
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