A revolutionary plant to put UK on top of the game
October 24, 2008 at 5:36 pm
The UK is going to break new ground next year and raise its recycling efforts up to the very latest in technological standards. A new recycling plant has been given the go ahead in West Sussex, which will make us here in the UK one of the leading players in the world in terms of speed and efficiency of waste management.
By 2009, the site at Ford Airfield on the south coast will potentially be up and running, thanks to the company Viridor Waste Management. The project has been overseen by members of the local parish council and residents of the local area, forming a group called the Ford Material Recycling Facility Liaison Group, who have been on hand throughout the entire planning process.
The site will manage up to 85,000 tonnes of local waste per year. What is different though about this site is the sheer volume of materials it can sort and the different range of materials it can handle and all of this at much greater speeds than those currently achieved in similar plants. One of the new innovations is a conveyor belt fitted with highly sensitive sensors that pick out different items from the belt and send them to different sections of the plant. Shape, texture, colour, magnetisation and weight are just some of the new ways it selects items. This plant will be setting a benchmark for the rest of the recycling facilities here in the UK when it opens.
Vehicle recycling rises
October 15, 2008 at 10:30 am
Last May, the Drivers and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) announced that only around three quarters of a million of the two million vehicles scrapped annually in the UK had Certificates of Destruction (CODs). However, the figure for this year looks set to rise.
How many of us have even heard of Certificates of Destruction though, let alone know what they are, why they are important, who can issue them and why we should steer clear of the illegal operators in the business?
Four years ago, regulations were introduced governing the environmental standards for recycling “end-of-life vehicles” (ELVs). The certificates can only be issued by recycling operators, known as Authorised Treatment Facilities, who meet the standards set down by Europe’s ELV directive.
There are over 1400 treatment facilities in the UK which have been able to prove that vehicles are scrapped in an environmentally friendly fashion. For instance, before vehicles are shredded, they must have hazardous oil, other fluids such as petrol and components removed, in a way unlikely to damage the environment. All motor manufacturers have opted for one of two recycling companies – Autogreen and Car Take Back – to deal with their vehicles, but there is no obligation on the owner to use the company chosen by the manufacturer.
Many owners of vehicles to be scrapped seem, however, to be unaware of the requirements, and Duncan Wemyss of the Motor Vehicle Dismantlers’ Association feels that a major publicity campaign is needed. He suggests that a leaflet in the annual road tax reminder would raise public awareness.
There is also the problem of a loophole in the system, which allows drivers to tick a box on the deregistration form, indicating that they have scrapped the vehicle themselves, cutting out the need for a certificate. In May last year, the DVLA claimed that steps were being taken in conjunction with the Department for Trade and Industry to solve the loophole but, five months later, Duncan Wemyss said: "The DVLA is doing nothing to support the legal operator. There has been a lot of talking but it has done nothing as yet to overcome this and there are people now who are considering closing down because they are not getting the vehicles through."
The high price of scrap metal is a motivating factor in continuing their illegal trade, making it increasingly difficult for the legal operators to compete. For the driver, however, the scheme should be straightforward, with no fee being charged for scrapping the unwanted vehicle and with most of the UK’s population being within a 30 mile drive of an Authorised Treatment Facility.
Energy from waste a threat to long term recycling targets?
October 14, 2008 at 1:58 pm
A protest has failed to stop plans for an incinerator to provide energy from waste in East Sussex. The protest against the Newhaven incinerator, which would burn more than 200,000 tonnes of waste each year, was mounted by a coalition of different groups concerned by its impact on the long-term outlook for recycling. The High Court rejected the protests in a ruling.
Those behind the protest included the Defenders of the Ouse Valley, Newhaven Town Council, and the Lewes District Friends of the Earth. Their concern is that incinerating waste destroys the urgency of the recycling message to the Newhaven community and beyond. Aside from the question of carbon emissions, incineration discourages people from recycling as much of their waste as they can. They argue that regional recycling targets of 60 percent of all household waste by 2025 require the East Sussex and Brighton and Hove County Councils to change radically householders’ approach to waste.
Councils are under pressure to keep waste out of landfill, and public spending can only fuel this concern about the lack of importance being attached to everyday awareness of recycling. Funds were withdrawn earlier in the year from the recycling promotion organization WRAP, whilst £2 billion in Private Finance Initiative credits are available to councils to meet the costs of waste management. A network of anti-incineration campaigners has published a map showing the locations of more than 100 planned sites for incinerators across the UK.
The Big Farce
October 8, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Doncaster council has become one of the newest members of The Big Tidy-Up campaign, an anti-litter initiative launched by Keep Britain Tidy. The scheme enjoyed something of a heyday throughout September with a number of events aimed at increasing public awareness of pressing environmental issues. Unfortunately, despite the publicity surrounding the campaign, the local council persists in demolishing housing estates, creating desolate areas plagued by gangs, unlicensed motorcycles, and piles of litter and debris.
Edlington and Hyde Park are two small suburbs on the outskirts of Doncaster. The former was once home to the biggest coal mine in Great Britain but its population is declining rapidly owing to the demolition of two of its larger housing estates. Doncaster council has vexed countless residents by refusing to develop the brown-belt land left in the wake of house clearance, with some landowners blasting the scheme as a major contributor to anti-social behaviour.
The Big Tidy Up is an admirable venture but one that is not going to gain any popularity beyond primary school classrooms unless its ultimate goals become less cosmetic and more visible in the community. At present, the scheme manifests itself as a thin veil over more important issues. The decision not to extend the campaign to local woodland tracks in dire need of maintenance, for example, may prove lethal.
The Doncaster Free Press has reported that the total cost of estate demolition is around the £14 million mark, approximately thirteen times more than the site is worth to developers. The council is haemorrhaging cash under the guise of regeneration and an insistence on creating the perfect haven for commercial entities. This revelation comes only a week after it was discovered that the local airport (Robin Hood) is not financially viable. The Big Tidy Up campaign appears to be the metaphorical equivalent of putting a plaster on a severed leg: unless the big issues are addressed first, recycling and encouraging people to dispose of their litter properly is going to do nothing to preserve the local environment.
Mixed messages in dumping scandal
September 30, 2008 at 9:56 am
Revelations made by ITV’s Tonight programme (aired 08/09/08) are being underplayed by the recycling industry. The show revealed that recycling collected by 4 separate local councils in the UK is being shipped and dumped illegally in India. Waste collected by Leicestershire County Council, and Wakefield, Wellingborough and Tendring District Councils was discovered 4500 miles away, buried in an area of farmland at the base of the Nilgiri Hills in the state of Tamil Nadu.
According to the programme, a tonne of waste can be dumped in India for £40, as opposed to being recycled within the UK for £148. Apparently a company near to the site is supposed to be importing and recycling British paper waste but is instead buying our waste unsorted, having dollar-a-day labourers sift it, and dumping whatever cannot be used.
The documentary, entitled ‘A Rubbish Service’, and reporter Mark Jordan’s accompanying Daily Mail article, paint a worrying picture.
Not the whole story
However, the Environmental Agency is confident that the vast majority of the 12-14 million tonnes of waste exported from the UK to be recycled in developing countries is done so legally, and claims that the story unearthed by ITV is not indicative of wider problems in the international recycling market.
Head of Waste at the EA, Liz Parks, has voiced concerns over the media handling of the story, identifying the real issue as being “poor quality recyclables” and not the shipping of waste abroad. Paul Dumpleton, Director of Materials for waste and recycling firm Shanks, believes the fault lies with the Indian paper mill close to the site at the centre of the controversy. Speaking to letsrecycle.com, Dumpleton explained that “recyclable material found in the Indian landfill sites were the out throws of the paper mill that was close to the site in question.” He emphatically states that “this has nothing to do with commingled collections. It is nothing to do with illegal shipments. It is just about the process in an Indian paper mill.”
Hopefully Parks and Dumpleton are right, and the documentary’s findings do not herald a bigger problem much closer to home.
Accusations of “double standards” fly
September 24, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Just when we thought we were doing well as a nation with our recycling, it turns out that there is no room for complacency. Accusations of double standards have been flying recently, with those in the south east of England apparently being the worst offenders.
It seems that far too many of us are heavily reliant on our local council’s schemes rather than taking the initiative ourselves. According to research for Zurich Insurance, thousands of tonnes of rubbish are sent to landfill each week which, if we were just that bit more motivated, could be recycled.
Almost a quarter of us feels that it is too much trouble to go to the local facility and would rather throw rubbish out than have to recycle it ourselves. Whilst a respectable number of us are happy to do our green duty so long as the council picks up our recycling, a small minority (one in eleven) are too lazy even to sort our rubbish and one in eight of us simply cannot be bothered washing out tins and containers for recycling.
If the British public cannot be educated into taking more personal responsibility for recycling then, according to a spokesperson for Zurich Municipal, it is essential that councils “continue to develop flexible plans to meet the demands of this changing landscape."
Zurich’s research also showed that fly tipping has become more of a problem over the last three years and that people in the UK want harsh measures taken against offenders. Almost half of us feels that the vehicle used to commit the offence should be destroyed and almost a fifth would like to see the offenders serve a prison sentence.
Supermarkets finally to recycle food waste
September 17, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Ever wondered what happens to all those old bruised and black bananas and all those potatoes with shoots sprouting out of them when they are done with in the major supermarkets? Well sadly and strangely the answer wasn’t a very good one for the environment… until now. This might soon be about to change.
Waitrose announced this month that they would be piloting a new ingenious scheme that will mean all that old food will be turned into a renewable fuel. There will be five Waitrose stores across the UK that will be gathering all their old degradable food and then seeing it heated and turned into a methane-rich bio-gas that will be capable of acting as a replacement for electricity. It then leaves an odourless and entirely organic fertiliser.
Anaerobic digestion might sound like a physical way of helping us avoid stomach aches but it’s actually the name of the process. It is much easier than we might think to hold back all the waste foods from the supermarkets and then add to a container for this process. It’s not actually Waitrose who conduct the anaerobic digestion but a company called Biogen.
It’s Waitrose’s aim to power over 500 homes using this process and to get the bio-gas plugged into the National Grid as soon as the tests have been passed and approved. Something that helps prevent things going to landfill and also provides us with a new source of energy seems likely to be a sure fire hit.
UK recycles the most mobiles
September 10, 2008 at 1:17 pm
A consumer survey released by Nokia has revealed that the UK is top of the global league when it comes to recycling mobile phones. 10% of people interviewed in the UK had recycled a mobile phone in the past, which doesn’t sound like an awful lot. However, when you consider that only 3% of people across the world have recycled a phone, the UK is well ahead of the pack.
The survey consisted of interviewing 6,500 people in 13 different countries, including Germany, Finland, USA, Nigeria and Brazil amongst others, to create a truly global picture of the state of mobile phone recycling. The aim of the survey was to find out about the attitudes and behaviours of people across the world, and also to provide information about Nokia’s own recycling schemes.
As well as the low rates of recycling in evidence across the world, the survey also revealed a large amount of ignorance on the matter. One fifth of people in the UK are unaware that mobile phones can even be recycled and the figure across the world is even worse, with an average of 50% saying they did not know it was possible.
Markus Terho, director of environmental affairs, said that if everyone who owns a mobile device brought back just one unused device we “could save 240,000 tonnes of raw materials”, which would be equivalent to “taking four million cars off the road” in terms of the amount of greenhouse gasses released.
Nokia has recently opened a new service outside their main Regent Street store, promoting greater recycling of handsets. Each new handset box sold will provide recycling information to increase awareness and will hopefully lead to a greater number of phones being recycled in the future.
Council taxpayers face £3 billion landfill fines
September 3, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Despite a recently reported rise in recycling rates, local councils will face fines of up to £3 billion for waste sent to landfill – a bill ultimately paid by council taxpayers.
Surprisingly, Environment Minister Joan Ruddock seemed pleased with the latest municipal waste statistics, covering the period from October to December 2007, saying,
“Local authorities and their residents are making good progress. We still have some way to go before we are performing at the level of some of our nearest neighbours in Europe. But we are catching them up, and positive feedback like this should encourage all of us to keep up the effort to reduce and recycle our rubbish.”
A closer look at the figures shows that the “good progress” includes a reduction in household waste from 25.8m to 25.6m tonnes – a drop of just 0.8 per cent. And although household recycling went up by 3 points to 33.9 per cent, this means that around two-thirds of our rubbish still ends up in landfill.
Responding to the statistics in rather less glowing terms, Councillor Paul Bettison from the Local Government Association said,
“Britain is the dustbin of Europe and dumps more waste into the ground than any other country in the EU. This is costing the council taxpayer dearly in landfill taxes. Councils are still facing fines of up to £3 billion if we do not dramatically reduce the amount of waste thrown into landfill.”
So does recycling in Britain really lag behind the rest of Europe?
Europe produces more than a billion tonnes of waste every year, but the EU is committed to reducing this. By early 2008, five EU countries had already achieved the 50 per cent recycling rate for municipal solid waste – the level currently being proposed by the European Parliament as a binding target for all EU governments by 2020. Denmark and the Netherlands, for example, send almost no waste to landfill, whilst the Netherlands and Austria recycle or compost the most waste, at more than 60 per cent each.
However, Britain certainly does not deserve the title of ‘dustbin of Europe’; previous statistics show that Greece landfills more than 90 per cent of its rubbish, with Portugal not far behind.
There’s no room for complacency, though. With the landfill tax rising each year, we must all reduce the amount of waste we generate – especially the type that can’t be recycled – if we want to keep council tax bills down. Nearly two thirds of all household rubbish can be recycled, which saves energy and raw materials. Even better is avoiding waste in the first place, or repairing and re-using items.
Remember the waste hierarchy: Prevention; Re-use; Recycling; Other forms of recovery; Disposal.
If your council is poor at recycling, write to them or contact your local councillor to demand better recycling facilities now. Find details for your council here.
Cambridgeshire Council to offer cooking oil recycling
August 27, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Both residents and the environment will benefit from a scheme being introduced in Cambridgeshire, to recycle cooking oil. Living Fuels, a company operating from Norfolk, has joined forces with Cambridgeshire County Council to provide banks at ten civic amenity sites across the county.
Householders will be able to take their used cooking oil in sealed containers to their nearest bank. The banks will be emptied and the contents taken to a plant in Thetford where it will be converted into LF100 fuel, which can be used to produce clean electricity. Currently Living Fuel collects around 80,000 litres of oil which converts into electricity for 5,700 homes. The estimate for the total amount of cooking oil used each year in the UK is 225,000 tonnes, which has the potential for producing energy for 2,200 homes. For further details of just what the process involves see the company website.
The scheme is good news too for Anglian Water, who estimate that they spend £5 million each year dealing with blockages in drains and sewers, caused by people pouring old cooking oil down their sinks and toilets.
Living Fuel already provides banks free of charge in Suffolk and Norfolk and plans are afoot to extend the scheme to London, where they will be providing two banks in each of three as yet unnamed boroughs.
In the past, most of its supplies of used cooking oil have come from the hospitality industry, schools and prisons, local authorities and government agencies and the food manufacturing industry, with private households being a previously untapped source of raw material.
