The Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility in Leeds is much taller than the plant in Sheffield, slicker and modern-looking. The whole power station is housed under a giant wooden archway and walled with thin panes of glass (identical, for those familiar with it, to the archway of Sheffield’s Winter Gardens, but ten times the size). One side of the 12-storey building is a beautiful vertical garden with its own irrigation system.
R: “This garden costs the council £1,400 a month to maintain. But it’s part of the contract, it’s a public building.”
The bin wagon parking area is an underground garage with a grass domed roof. C, a chemical engineer from Birmingham, describes it as “The Telly-Tubby House”.
R is a young engineer who speaks with a thick, confident Spanish accent. She knows the facts and figures of every process, and the diameter of every pipe we walk past as she explains the workings of the plant.
R: “Here is the fibre-recovery facility. We used to make a fibre-based product with paper and cardboard extracted from black bin waste — similar to those cardboard trays you get with your coffee at McDonalds... however... we could not find a buyer for the product, so the process has been discontinued.”
Bin waste at Leeds is shredded before incineration: wagons deliver bin bags into the tipping hall, and operators in JCBs load the waste into shredding hoppers, which feed the waste onto a series of conveyor belts, centrifuges, infra-red and electro-magnetic sorting processes. The technology can automatically separate metals, paper and card, and all the different grades of plastic from the waste stream.
I’m astounded at the speed and sophistication of the technology. The other Recycling centres I’ve seen have a line of workers sorting waste off conveyor belts by hand — a low-paid, filthy, boring job that’s prone to accidents. Leeds plant has automated the whole process; the infra-red sensors are able (I’m told) to identify any kind of material running over the belt. The sensor sends a signal to a valve, which releases a pulse of air directly onto the piece of waste, pushing it onto a different conveyor belt.
“This separator has been isolated.” R tells us with some guilt and disappointment. “Veolia couldn’t find a buyer for dirty, low-quality plastic and card.”
G, a technician from London, nods knowingly. “I think the council don’t want to tell anyone what to do. They want recycling, but don’t want to put out education materials to the public — recycling separated at source is just better quality than anything extracted from black bins. It takes a lot of water and energy to process and clean this stuff.”
R: “And anything that can’t be sold ends up in Energy Recovery [incineration] anyway! All the energy gone into extracting it is just wasted.”
The sorting hall is a web of criss-crossing conveyor belts entering and leaving deactivated separating machines. Shredding the waste makes it easier to move and separate, but only metals are extracted now. The hall is littered with waste and bird shit, it’s hot and difficult to breathe.
F, the Leeds technician, shouts a warning through our ear-muffs: “We need to hire more technicians here — but no-one wants to work in this area — they’ll stick to the main plant, but veto the sorting area. And just so you know — there are some rats in here!”
• Emma Rickman is an engineer in a Combined Heat and Power plant
