Have you seen west London’s new Energy Recovery Facility?

At the moment all the black bags of rubbish from homes in west London are put on our Waste Train and sent to landfill, but next year all that is going to change.

As part of our 27 year residual waste treatment contract with Suez environnement (formerly SITA UK Ltd) a new Energy Recovery Facility, using the latest technology, is currently being built in an industrial zone just outside Bristol. Building work has been underway for 18 months and the site has been transformed in preparation to start taking in west London’s rubbish from August 2016.

So what can you see in these pictures and if you were working on the site?

• All the ground works such as the foundations and pilling that make the facility sturdy and fit for use have been completed
• The steel frame for the whole facility is complete, over the next 12 months the rest of the building will be finished
• The gantry cranes that will be used to unload the containers of rubbish from the trains are in place
• The bunker where the rubbish is taken after being unloaded from the train is ready to store rubbish before it’s converted in to energy.
• The boilers  that will be  heated to generate the steam to create the energy have been lifted into place
• The administration building outer shell is complete, it’s the one looking finished (at least from the outside) in the pictures!

The construction of this £220m facility is running to plan. When it’s opened next year it ‘s expected that six trains a week will make the return trip from the waste transfer stations at South Ruislip and Brentford. Sending the waste to the new energy recovery facility by train instead of using lorries saves the equivalent of 130 road journeys a day.

Each year the Energy Recovery Facility will convert up to 300,000 tonnes a year of our black bag waste into enough renewable energy to power approximately 50,000 homes.

We’ll be keeping you updated over the next year as more and more of the facility is completed. Check back in September  to see how much it’s changed.