Incinerator: We visit London plant
HOUSEHOLD and business waste from central and west London began arriving this week at a massive new incinerator which it is claimed will be one of the UK’s most efficient energy recovery plants.
Cory Environmental, the UK arm of the Anglo-US consortium hoping to build a similar energy from waste incinerator on Lynn’s outskirts, is the company behind the Riverside plant at Belvedere, on the bank of the River Thames, in the London borough of Bexley.
And last week it invited the Lynn News to visit the £365m complex – three times the size of the one proposed for Lynn – to see the equipment it has installed there to handle much of the capital’s household and business waste, monitor the various processes and control emissions.
It has taken more than 20 years from the initial concept for the Riverside plant to come to fruition, as Cory had to manage one of the longest and most high profile planning processes for any waste project in the UK.
John Boldon, the company’s director of planning and communications, said that as this project would be producing more than 50 megawatts of electricity, it was deemed to be a power station.
Therefore, the procedures Cory had to follow fell under the Electricity Act, not the normal planning system, and the Department of Trade and Industry became the planning authority. “If there is one objection from a statutory consultee, there has to be a public inquiry,” he said.
As several objections were received, two public inquiries were held – for 13 weeks in 2003 and three weeks in 2005 – before the Trade and Industry Secretary granted planning permission in June 2006. “This application went through a greater degree of scrutiny than any other proposal in the country,” Mr Boldon said.
One of the biggest issues was that people in east London did not like having to take the waste from the city and west central London. Another was that feeding enough waste to the incinerator could crowd out recycling.
Mr Boldon said: “We demonstrated that was just not the case and called on evidence from London and comparisons in Europe, as they are ahead of us quite significantly because you find that recycling and incineration go hand in glove. What it crowds out and eliminates is waste going to landfill.”
The planning director pointed out: “At the time, we didn’t convince people locally because they were firmly of the opinion that the facility shouldn’t be here. But we have set up a community liaison group and since then I think we have won over the hearts and minds of that group, and we have lots of the objectors on that group.”
Twenty community and business leaders sit on the Riverside Community Forum, which meets every three months, and members have been taken to similar plants in Europe that have been there for years to see what they are like.
“Once they see them operating, those concerns start to disappear and they come round to them,” said Mark Walsh, Cory’s project manager for construction of the Riverside plant. “The forum members are an asset to us now where before they were hostile towards us.”
A new half-mile road was constructed to the Riverside site before building work began on the incinerator in July 2008. The first waste is arriving there this week and Mr Walsh said it will be one of the most efficient energy recovery plants in Europe.
Riverside has the capacity to take up to 670,000 tonnes of waste from households and businesses a year, with all but 85,000 tonnes being delivered along the River Thames in enclosed containers on barges.
The containers arrive at the end of a purpose-built jetty, 200 metres from the river bank, and are taken by special tractor units to the tipping hall in the building, where the contents are discharged into the waste storage bunker.
Cory says that using barges for the waste will keep 100,000-plus lorries off the capital’s roads. Those lorries that do bring in waste will reach the tipping hall via a giant access ramp.
Cranes pick up the waste which goes onto the furnace bed and is then subjected to temperatures exceeding 850°C. Air from the tipping hall and bunker area is sucked into the combustion units to prevent the escape of odour, dust or litter and aid the burning process.
Bottom ash falls into a bunker and heat energy is recovered from the flue gases through specialist, high efficiency boilers in a room larger than a football pitch. The superheated steam drives a turbine which can supply up to 72 megawatts of electricity.
The main residue from the process is bottom ash and about 180,000 tonnes of this ash, including metals, will be produced each year. This will be collected in the ash bunker, loaded into covered containers and sent back on the barges for metal recovery and for recycling into road building and construction aggregates.
Mr Walsh said: “The only bit we can’t recycle is fly ash, which goes to a salt mine in Cheshire to be deep buried.”
All aspects of the plant’s operation are controlled and monitored to the strict standards of the European Union waste incineration directive, he pointed out.
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Comments
There are 3 comments to this article
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Clean Air Voter
Saturday, January 29, 2011 at 03:57 PMI think many people are confused because they know landfill has to finish. The nasty side of this is their will be more landfill with incineration. There is bottom ash and fly ash. The less toxic ash used for the building industry. Not many building blocks been used in the last 4 years with the recession. Complaints from residents of chemical smells emitted from foot paths and roads where this ash has been used even though it is mixed with bitumen especially in hot weather. Why is it at the moment some inexperienced councils pushing incineration. Their answer is the financial benefits, because landfill tax on ash is £2.50 per ton compared to £48 per ton for normal waste. Tax on ash will be increasing soon because the more alarming reason is there will be a glut of it. This is when we get a hike in our council tax. Now the toxic ash. This is transported in sealed containers to wait for it LANDFILL. This nasty substance is so bad that it is a health hazard and now dumped in Cheshire’s salt mines. This is the ash that cannot be filtered out. This is the ash that stays in your body for life. What is the greener and safer alternative what most well respected councils use? This is Mechanical Biological Treatment, short for recycling. Used in Scotland and the Northwest of England. Manchester have built five of these plants, Cambridge. All of these are aiming for zero waste with incineration could never achieve. Most Mechanical Biological treatment plants are built by Shanks Wheelabrator?
Dave King's Lynn
Friday, January 28, 2011 at 08:53 AMChunky, I asked Wheelabrator this question at the Dukes Head Exhibition. They said South Lincolnshire and North Cambridgeshire plus parts of Norfolk. The rubbish from the Yarmouth area is going to the incinerator, now ploughing its way through its planning application, to be built at Gt. Blakenham in Suffolk. My wife wrote to Murphy (alias the Cameron of Norfolk or was it God) but he doesn't speak to us lower beings. We are only the idiots standing in the way of his master plan. Is this incinerator actually burning anything yet? Building started in 2008 and the first rubbish is arriving but was this being burnt or are the visitors just seeing a brand new shiny factory? If it is not burning we don't know what visibly comes out of the chimney and we can't know if the monitors are picking up contaminants!
Chunky
Friday, January 28, 2011 at 08:37 AMThe population in the catchment area for London incinerator is greater than that in Lynn. so I ask my original question again. Who will supply the rubbish for lynn's proposed incinerator, it catchment area, this should be in the business plan. If the money has been granted to build it then this information should be available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.
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