TK Lynskey Excavations, a demolition and construction company, is building the new plant in Rotherham with the support of the Waste and Resources Action Programme. The grant is the first of its kind to be awarded from the Aggregates Sustainability Levy Fund after it was initially blocked by the European Commission.
“At this moment in time we have no recycling facility and most of our waste goes to landfill,” said Martin Lynskey, managing director of TK Lynskey Excavations, “Now we hope to get a decent revenue from secondary aggregates.”
The selected four-acre site at Wath-Upon-Dearne will now house one of the most advanced segregation and processing systems in Europe. Manufactured by Redox, a Dutch company, the plant will completely process the waste coming in. It will mainly handle material from TK Lynskey sites, but will also accept material from local authorities, utility companies and other waste producers.
“We hope to be able to recycle 85-95% of construction and demolition waste,” said Mr Lynskey, “I have great faith in the equipment.”
The MD described seeking planning permission for the facility as a “long and winding road”, since it involved a three year fight to push the application through, after Rotherham council initially rejected it.
Now the grant has been awarded, building the facility can commence. “I’m highly delighted. I couldn’t have gone ahead with the project without it,” said Mr Lynskey, “The WRAP grant enhanced the scale of the operation.”
Mr Lynskey said he hopes to get revenue from both a charge for receiving material in and by selling the processed product. Landfill Tax on inert material is currently only around 2 per tonne. “We will only be able to make a minor charge to make it a viable alternative to landfill,” he said.
Although the site will be completed in September it will not reach full capacity until late 2005. John Barritt, head of aggregates at WRAP said: “It will be operational in September but will build up to its full capacity of 150,000 tonnes per year. They need to establish themselves in the market place as a point of disposal for aggregates so they can build up a reliable supply of material.”
Mr Barritt said that WRAP is currently finalising other aggregate recycling projects resulting from a capital grant competition. He explained the competition aimed to find schemes that “extract recyclable material from construction and demolition waste otherwise going to landfill, boost existing recycling and encourage the recycling of other aggregates such as china clay and synthetic aggregates”.
When launching the competition in 2002 they set a target to increase the use of recycled and secondary aggregates to 2 million tonnes by 2004. The fund comes from the Aggregates Levy Tax that charges around 2 per tonne of quarried material in the UK.
Mr Barritt said he could not discuss the specifics of these pending aggregate schemes. However, he did reveal: “In the next few weeks further announcements will be made as contracts are completed.”
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