The plant at Beddington Farmlands in Surrey was built with a 2 million grant from the London Recycling Fund and will be managed by Viridor Waste Management. The company will compost green waste from the boroughs, which was previously sent to landfill.
Collin Drummond, chief executive of Viridor said: “The plant has been custom-designed and built using state-of-the-art technology to control the composting process. It currently has a capacity of 15,000 tonnes per annum and this will rise to 30,000 tonnes, giving further opportunities to provide capacity for other customers from all sectors and directly contribute to London’s strategic waste recycling objectives.”
The facility works by putting the green waste through a screener to remove contaminants such as plastic and then uses a forced-air aerobic system. The green waste is put through six in-vessel tunnels and kept at around 60-65 degrees for ten days before it is transferred into windrows for further maturation.
Trials of the system have been conducted at the Farmlands, on which Viridor also manages a landfill and sewage treatment works, for the last three months. The first batch of compost has been used for land restoration at the 130 hectare site and now Viridor is researching markets for next batch.
Standard
Mr Drummond said: “It is intended that the compost produced will gain the PAS composting standard, which will ensure a high quality product and help to secure long-term markets in the area.”
 Jenz composting machinery at Beddington |
The site has planning permission to compost animal by-products but is initially just working with green waste. Phillip Wallace, a consultant at Enviros who worked with Viridor on designing the system said: “We are not fully geared up to take animal by-products but we do have planning consent. The next phase is to prepare to take kitchen waste.”
Viridor said that it is considering building and anaerobic digester which would be used to treat household kitchen waste to produce a soil conditioner and fuel gas to “generate green electricity.”
In addition to this the company is currently going through the planning process to open a 55,000 tonne MBT facility at Beddington next year, also funded by the London Recycling Fund.
Speaking about Viridor’s MBT plans, which also feature a number of other sites around the country, bid manager at Viridor, Richard Jenkins said: “A main consideration of ours is the results of the Environment Agency’s study into MBT outputs and what can be done with them.
“We are initially looking at producing a rough compost at Beddington. We will only be producing about 18,000 a year, so that’s not a huge amount. We’re not looking for markets,” he revealed.
Subscribe for free