Meeting the Demands of Zero Waste to Landfill

Meeting the Demands of Zero Waste to Landfill

UK Waste Solutions Limited (UKWSL) has a growing reputation of meeting the needs of it growing customer base. Our customers are producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste each year and are looking for sustainable solutions for reaching their targets of zero waste to Landfill.

If you are a existing company that is looking to increase its recycling levels or a potential customer come on our journey of increased recycling and zero waste to landfill.

UKWSL will look at the internal solution first and foremost, we have a range of wrap compliant containers that will allow you to understand waste segregation and divert waste from the landfill to the recycling route. Please note we will always look at the balance of cost against solution as we know this is a major factor when you develop your waste strategy.

Once we have segregated the waste streams UKWSL will provide a range of collection services that are designed to take your waste materials to a number of recycling facilities where your material will be weighed by material type, recycled and the figures reported back to you.

We know that there are some customers where the mix of waste and the lack of volume does not allow for on-site segregation as the extra containers may add to the cost and having an increased number of contractors collecting on separate days may result in increased levels of carbon being produced.

In these cases we are able to provide mixed recycling services using pre-treatment centres, segregated and recycled via various routes.

We recently completed an exercise where we took mixed municipal waste in a wheeled container, sent the material to a recycling centre and segregated the waste. Please see the results below.

1100 Litre Container Contents

Card & Paper 23%

Plastic 18%

Metal 6%

Textiles 3%

Glass 9%

Food Waste 18%

Residual Non Recyclable 23%

This solutions is likely to be more cost effective than having a general waste collection and 77% of the contents of the container was diverted from landfill.

We record these weights as an average as materials are mixed in with customers wastes that are collected on route, our customers may require specific information on their own materials, so in a number of cases we make a regular single collection of individual containers to get a more accurate representation and provide the weights from these specific collections.

The environment agency has given us backing that this is a very good best practice.

The residual waste is then sent to a number of waste to energy facilities that we have access to across the UK. The mass is used in a number of forms dependent upon the makeup of the fuel needed to run the plant. The energy produced from these plants is used for heat and power for business and communities across the country.

 

Cathy Cook
March 17th 2010