COMPANY PROFILE Where there’s a Willshee, there’s a way By SANDRA DICK
IT’S probably fair to say that there are times when Dean Willshee may be a rather frustrated boss.
Not that the company that his parents launched 35 years ago isn’t doing very well. Quite the opposite – the past five years have seen solid investment in the Burton-on-Trent business; it’s positively booming.
And it’s not that he isn’t proud of its successes. Who wouldn’t be chuffed to have their company named by the London Stock Exchange as one of the Top 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain, an honour that only goes to SMEs considered to be among the fastest growing and most dynamic in the country?
His home life is good – he has just become a dad and the family farm has just branched into tourism with new log cabins.
This would help the UK become
more self-sufficient with its energy requirements for many years to come.”
So, what on earth could be eating him?
“We have all these millions of tonnes of rubbish that could be providing electricity,” he points out. “But instead we are relying on bringing electricity from Europe.
“It doesn’t add up – we should be self- sufficient.”
Dean, of course, has a very keen interest in where Britain’s energy comes from. The Midlands-based business is keen to become a major player in the waste- to-fuel sector, with heavy investment in recent years on the most up-to-date separation technology.
As a result, it is helping its customers achieve zero waste to landfill by
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David Willshee (far left) and Dean Willshee (second left) recently invested in new vehicles to enable local businesses to recycle more easily.
converting anything that can’t be recycled into refuse-derived fuel (RDF) - and at the same time helping to alleviate the problem of how Britain can keep the lights on in a low-carbon, renewables- driven energy landscape.
There’s just that pesky issue of there being simply not enough RDF plants in Britain to accept the processed waste that Willshee’s and businesses like it are producing.
It’s among the issues that niggled Dean so much that he recently put pen to paper to raise the case in respected publication, The Parliamentary Review, which named Willshee’s as a Best Practice Representative for the waste sector and provides a platform for respected academics, business leaders, campaigners and commentators across a wide range of subject areas to voice their opinions to the people who matter.
“The challenge we encounter for non-
recyclables as a business and as an industry is having insufficient UK-based energy-from-waste plants to deal with the levels of waste created in the UK,” he wrote. “This means the majority of our RDF goes out to Europe.”
“The limited amount of UK outlets is a concern as we continue to grow our business and our tonnages.”
The UK currently exports 3.2m tonnes of RDF each year to Europe, where it’s used in energy-from-waste plants to create electricity and heat. It’s sustainable, a direct carbon fuel replacement and solves a major waste issue. So why, he asks, are we letting it go?
“With energy plants being required more than ever and waste in no short supply, we feel as a company that the government should be providing support for the energy-from-waste sector, as governments across Europe have done for many years.
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