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Following the waste stream.
Posted by: Doug Stewart
Last Friday I went on a tour of the Veolia waste processing site in Greenwich. The tour was arranged at my request by our cleaners who organise our recycling. I wanted to see where our waste went.
I do have to admit to a geeky fascination with waste (which will come as no surprise to those of you who read the worm blogs) and I’m a big fan of Bill McDonough who talks about waste as food. This not some hobo freegan bin diet kind of food but, the idea that waste is a nutrient and should be seen as a valuable resource to be used rather than a dirty end product to be dealt with and disposed of.
The big question for the day was to explore the differences between comingled and separated at source recycling. It was also my first time to see a trommel (from the Dutch word for drum), a giant spinning cylinder used to separate waste by size and weight. They also have an amazing bit of kit that uses a laser to spot plastic as small as a 50 pence piece on the conveyor belt then pin point it with a jet of air to move it to another conveyor. Amazing! To be fair though they still use humans to hand pick the final stage as all their gizmos can’t separate the streams 100%.
They say that shredded paper and plastic bags are two of their largest problems. If there were no bags in the mix the process would take 30% less energy. This brings me to my final point. How much energy does the plant use? The guy giving the tour said that they would be conducting an energy audit later in the year but that at present they had no figures. I find this hard to believe but will be chasing them at Christmas to hear what they have to say. So the debate about comingled verses source separated continues. Is the extra energy worth the ease of use for consumers and until we have more UK processing plants how much of a difference would clean waste steams make?
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