What happens to our waste and recycling?
COP27 has got us thinking. Not just about where we can be improving our sustainability credentials and carbon footprint, but ensuring our current systems, processes and contractors match our commitment to the UN's Global Goals.
The galling reality of processing recycling in the UK results in well over half of our collective plastics being shipped to places like Turkey to be 'processed' or worse, thousands of tonnes are burned here in the UK. This prompted us to reach out to our waste management supplier Spectrum to find out what exactly happens to the waste produced by guests at Home Farm Glamping:
- General Waste: is sent to Cory’s Riverside Resource Recovery Facility where it is used as a fuel for the generation of green electricity.
Cory can process up to 785,000 tonnes of general waste a year. Situated in Belvedere, Cory’s Riverside 1 facility is one of the largest operational EfW facilities in the UK and the only one with river infrastructure for receiving waste. An important by-product of the incineration process is steam. This steam is used to drive a turbine in the EfW facility that can produce partly renewable baseload electricity to power the equivalent of 160,000 homes or a town the size of Croydon. Find out more here.
- Dry Mixed Recycling: is sent to Bywaters in Bow, this is a Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) where the waste is segregated into its different types (i.e. cardboard, plastics, metals etc.), and is then bulked up baled and sent on to re-processors to be made into new products
Every year at the Bywaters facility in Bow over 6,000 tonnes of plastic waste is processed – including around 75 million plastic bottles and almost 184 million plastic bags. Their East London materials recovery facility (MRF) is powered by 4,000 solar panels and uses state-of-the-art equipment to separate waste into individual streams. This enables Bywaters to sort dry mixed recycling through a twelve-step segregation process in order to recycle as many materials as possible.
Materials are then baled ready to be recycled into new products like glass bottles, plastic toys, and paper. You can find out more here.
- Glass waste: is sent to a transfer station in Huntingdon, where it is bulked up and sent on to Berryman (part of the URM Group) a glass recycler.
Once it is collected from Home Farm, the glass is transported to a MRF (Materials Recycling Facility) or a glass recycling and treatment plant, such as the ones operated by URM.
The most popular and environmentally favourable approach to glass recycling is to remelt it to produce more bottles and jars. Every 1,000 tonnes of recycled glass that is used in this way saves 345,000 kWh of energy, 314 tonnes of CO2, 1,200 tonnes of raw material and 1,000 tonnes of landfill.
Once in the treatment plant, the raw cullet undergoes a number of processes to remove contamination, large metallic objects such steel cans and bottle caps are removed with magnets before the material passes into enclosed chambers where blown air is used to remove large lightweight objects such as paper, plastic bottles, and plastic jar lids. This material is then manually sorted to remove any objects which may cause issues during the recycling process.
From here the material is fed into a vertical dryer, this draws hot air up though the cullet as it enters the dryer, this flow of hot air will remove the moisture from the cullet as well as glass dust and paper labels which have been freed from the bottles and jars. The cullet which is now dry and clean passes over an Eddy Current separator to remove aluminium before it is transported to the sorting machines.
The material is fed into the sorting machines via vibrating feeders and conveyors, as the material passes through the primary sorting stage it is illuminated from below and above with different types of light, the high definition cameras inside the machines scan the image of each cullet and detect the (RGB) Red, Green, & Blue spectrum. The information from the camera is sent to the processing computer which evaluates the (RGB) against set parameters and detects for contamination - if sensed, it then sends a signal to the high speed, high accuracy compressed air jets to fire and eject the contamination from the flow of cullet.
The glass is then separated by the machines into the 3 main colours which are Flint (clear), Amber (Brown) and Green.
The final stage of the process is to crush the material to size before it is sampled and tested to ensure that it meets the required specifications. This material is then supplied to bottle and jar manufacturers who make new bottles and jars from the finished, high quality cullet.
This type of recycling is known as “Closed Loop” system, where waste material is turned back into its original form. In the case of glass bottles and jars this loop can be repeated over and over again, forever!
Find out more about URM and glass recycling here.
Recycling one glass bottle can save enough energy to power a TV for one and a half hours
- Food Waste: Most of our food waste goes through our on site composting system, however when we are hosting our large music and gastronomy events food waste is sent Severn Trent Environmental St. Albans.
Severn Trent Environmental is is an anaerobic digestion plant where the food waste is used to produce green electricity and a nutrient rich fertilizer for farmers to use aiding more crop production.
For farmers, these biosolids are a high-quality alternative to manufactured fertilisers – at a competitive price – and play a vital role in enhancing soil quality and fertility. We know this as we use the anaerobic digestate from Severn Trent, as they are just up the road from us. Even more closed loop! Find out more here.
As a business, Home Farm Glamping has to pay for commercial waste disposal so while this is comes at an operational cost to us, it means we have peace of mind knowing where our waste is going. You can write to your local council to find out what happens to your domestic waste and in the meantime, you can sign this petition (bottom of the page) to stop sending our plastic waste on other countries; cut the UK’s single use plastic by 50% by 2025; and roll out a Bottle Return Scheme.
