Resource Use

Great Blakenham incinerator comes online

Great Blakenham incinerator comes online

SITA UK’s £185-million incinerator in Great Blakenham has this week begun exporting power to the National Grid.

The combined heat and power (CHP) plant, which forms part of SITA’s 25-year, £1-billion private finance initiative (PFI) waste management contract with Suffolk County Council, has the capacity to burn up to 269,000 tonnes of residual waste a year and generate enough electricity for 30,000 homes.

The plant has been burning residual waste from homes and business across Suffolk since June 2014, when testing of all the equipment and procedures began. In August, the incinerator also began burning waste from Norfolk, after the county council applied to Suffolk for help following the abandonment of its own incinerator project.

On Monday (1 December), the testing phase was successfully completed, and the facility handed over from the building contractors to SITA UK, which will run it for the next 25 years on behalf of Suffolk County Council.

‘Opened on time and on budget’

Paul Leighton, Plant Manager for SITA UK’s Great Blakenham CHP, commented: “This facility turns something we don’t want – the waste left after recycling  – into something we do – enough electricity for 30,000 homes.

“After nearly three years of construction and comprehensive testing to make sure everything works as it should, we are really proud to have delivered this project on time, on budget and with an excellent health and safety record.”

Councillor Rebecca Hopfensperger, Suffolk County Council’s cabinet member for localities, environment and waste, added: “The county council, together with the Suffolk Waste Partnership, promised this project would be good for the taxpayer, a good environmental solution and deliverable.

“We have met all of these promises. This year alone we are making an £8-million saving for Suffolk. The facility will reduce our carbon emissions, produce enough electricity for 30,000 homes and is on track to achieve the environmental gold standard of BREEAM excellence.

“We have proved the facility is deliverable in Suffolk by opening on time and on budget. The county council has shown that by acting in a business-like manner it can deliver what it promised.”

Tomato project

According to environmental consultancy AEA, incinerators that only produce electricity have efficiencies of between 15 and 25 per cent, but this can rise to up to 79 per cent when heat is also used.

However, to date CHP plants have proved relatively unsuccessful at delivering heat energy, as the extensive pipe networks involved are often deemed too disruptive and expensive.

To try and justify the expense of laying down the £2-million heat pipeline at Great Blakenham, SITA UK is expected to soon provide a nearby greenhouse project with heat to grow tomatoes.

The £30-million tomato-growing centre, currently under construction next to the B1113 between Great Blakenham and Bramford, will eventually see two giant greenhouses – covering nearly 50 acres (20 hectares) of land – use surplus heat from the incinerator to grow around 7,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year (around 10 per cent of all tomatoes grown in Britain).

The company behind the project, Sterling Suffolk (set up by local farmers Michael Blakenham and Stephen Wright), expects the facility to be growing plants by the end of next year.

The incinerator’s visitor centre is also expected to open in 2015.

Energy-from-waste overcapacity

Despite the potential benefits of using waste heat from the incineration process, the growing number of incinerators in the UK has come under scrutiny recently, with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) withdrawing funding from several recovery projects over the last year, after finding that the 29 energy-from-waste projects that already have funding are ‘sufficient’ to meet the EU’s 2020 landfill diversion targets.

Further to this, waste consultancy Eunomia Research & Consulting warned last week that due to the amount of energy recovery facilities being built, the UK’s residual waste treatment capacity will exceed supply in 2017/18.

This could lead to a situation of potential overcapacity in 2018/19 of around 2.5 million tonnes. It is estimated that this could eventually result in overcapacity of 16.4 million tonnes in 2030/31, restricting the UK’s recycling rate to 66 per cent.

Find out more about the Blakenham incinerator.