comes from businesses through food production, food preparation waste or left-overs – it’s not hard to see why. Currently much of that food waste ends up in landfill and as it decomposes it gives off methane, a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more harmful than carbon dioxide. However it’s no secret that methane burns very well as a fuel. So wouldn’t it make sense to capture it and use it to create green energy? That’s exactly what our rapidly growing anaerobic digestion (AD) infrastructure is all about: turning waste food into green energy, fertiliser and water.
Currently there is a lack of large scale facilities to recycle food and create energy from it but the Government’s Anaerobic Digestion strategy is a step forward and shows their commitment to increasing energy from waste through AD. But the financial support being offered will do little to put the necessary infrastructure in place to deal with the 6.5 million tonnes of food waste per annum which could feasibly be collected according to Eunomia’s report on AD. And currently just 300,000 tonnes are being collected across the UK.
Biffa is at the forefront of building a national network of AD facilities and earlier this year opened the UK’s first ‘super’ AD plant at Cannock, Staffordshire. It will take up to 120,000 tonnes of food waste every year, much of it waste from the food industry which would traditionally have ended up in landfill. And there’s more in the pipeline. Biffa already has an existing AD plant in Leicestershire, and is in the process of building a Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) plant in West Sussex which will incorporate a larger AD plant (140,000 tonnes). And technology is developing all the time. Biffa’s plant in Poplars can take packaged food and separate it which makes it even easier for businesses to recycle, and
where possible the packaging materials are recycled too.
Dedicated mixed plastics recycling One of the materials that is separated from food waste at our AD facilities is plastic packaging – which is processed at our dedicated plastics recycling facility Biffa Polymers. It’s another relatively new market which Biffa has heavily invested in which produces new plastics for a variety of uses – including food grade packaging. In fact Biffa Polymers was the first to produce food grade recycled high density polyethylene (rHDPE) plastic from milk bottles. Currently 80% of the UK’s milk bottles have been made with plastic from Biffa Polymers.
Earlier this year, the facility launched its mixed plastics recycling facility which has the capacity to process up to 20,000 tonnes of non-food grade plastic waste every year. It can sort a variety of different plastics by type and colour before being processed into high quality material for use in consumer products such as paint trays, plant pots, storage boxes, pallets, bottles, car parts and office furniture.
These are great examples of how advances in technology are really making a difference. Being able to sort materials in this way means our collection services are simple for our customers, which drives up recycling tonnage and reduces costly landfill charges.
Biffa is absolutely leading the development of further technology and infrastructure that the country both needs and demands. Legislation and consumer demand means that businesses and households want to recycle more. And it makes sense. Where is the logic in putting material in landfill when they can be recycled into new products, or used to generate green energy?
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