When we put our bins out each week for collection, for most people that is the end of the problem, but for the staff of the Veolia Household Waste Recycling facility at Battlefield, it is only the start. A group from WACF visited the site to find out what happens to our rubbish.
When we arrived we were first shown to a meeting room and given a slide presentation. The first thing we learnt was that Battlefield only deals with the contents of your black bin. Ever since a tax was introduced on landfill, refuse disposal has become a highly specialised industry. For the contents of our recycling boxes, the site acts as one of a series of transfer stations, collecting the materials that are then dispatched to specialist centres all over the country; glass is sent to York, plastic to Rainham (Essex), metals to south Wales. Electrical items are sent to be stripped down to their component parts, while TV screens and computers go to another specialist. (Did you know that the mobile phone in your pocket contains both gold and silver that can be extracted and reused?)
The garden waste from your green bin is collected by Shropshire council and turned into compost, though the council is now running 'Master composting' courses on home composting.
Veolia are constantly looking for new ways to turn our rubbish into something that can be reused. They already market a soil improver made from the ash from their furnaces, a brand of paint (Greenleaf) from recycling old paint and are shortly to release a car shampoo made from the residue of fabric conditioner.
However their main product is energy. The plant at Battlefield produces enough energy from the 90,000 tonnes of waste that it receives to power not just the plant itself but 10,000 homes.
We were kitted out in hard hats, hi-vis jackets, goggles and ear defenders and taken on a tour around the plant. When the refuse lorries arrive they tip the contents of your black bin into a huge 4-storey-high bunker that is totally enclosed to minimise any dust or smell. Our first sight of this was from the control room at the top of the building where an operative looks through a glass wall and works a grab that constantly mixes the rubbish (if you remember the finale of Toy Story 3 you've got a fair idea).
On the other side of the room another member of staff keeps watch over a bank of screens that show both live pictures and graphs giving information on temperature and air quality around the site. I was amazed to learn that the whole place is run by just 24 staff.
From the bunker the rubbish travels on a conveyor into the furnace. We followed its progress into the furnace building where we were allowed to peek through a small inspection window at a fire the burns 24 hours a day at temperatures in excess of 850 C. A furnace needs air as well as fuel and the air is continuously sucked out of the delivery area where you go to deposit any items you can't put in the black bin; this again reduces dust and smells – and explains why there is always a draught in that area.
The heat produced by the furnace powers turbines that produce electricity that is fed into the national grid.
The residue from the burning travels along another conveyor, under magnets that extracts any ferrous metals. The remaining slag can be ground up to be used as aggregate for road construction.
The air from the furnace is scrubbed to remove any impurities, so any plume you see emerging from the tower is just water vapour. Veolia monitor their emissions carefully and the results are published on their website.
So next time you put your bins at the kerbside, think about the journey that the contents will take!
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