Visit to Integra South East Energy Recovery Facility at Portsmouth
Pam Mason

In late October, 20 CPRE members and friends took part in a guided tour of the new Energy Recovery Facility in Portsmouth. The tour was led by Keely Gallagher, and included a Presentation of how and why the plant was built, followed by a visit to the control room and to the very busy & noisy plant working area. The visit gave us a fascinating insight into the way Hampshire County is dealing with the growing problem of waste disposal, and after many questions, which Keely was able to answer in considerable depth and with great enthusiasm, we all left with a much greater understanding of how we can all do our part in helping Hampshire to become a leader in waste management. Here are some facts that we felt our members may find interesting.

Waste Management in Hampshire

Waste management in Hampshire is managed via Project Integra, which is a unique partnership between Hampshire County Council, the two unitary authorities of Southampton and Portsmouth, the 11 District Councils within Hampshire, and Veolia Environmental Services.

Landfill

This is used as a last resort, and there is currently only one operational landfill site in Hampshire.

Recycling

At present, Hampshire recycles waste via the kerbside collection system, Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs) or via the 1600 recycling bank sites throughout the county. The network of bank sites caters for other materials, including clothes, books, and glass bottles and jars. The HWRCs also take bulky materials, batteries, soil and rubble, textiles, glass and metals, among other things - ask at your local site for more details, or telephone 0845 603 5634.

The kerbside collection takes newspapers and magazines, cardboard, junk mail, food and drinks cans and plastic bottles. These are taken to a materials Recovery facility (MRF) to be separated, sorted and sent for reprocessing. The MRF at Portsmouth is currently recovering 62,000 tonnes per year. The MRF facility at Alton, which CPRE visited in 2006, is capable of recovering 95,000 tonnes per year.

Green garden waste is separated at the HWRCs and also collected from some households. This material is composted at a number of facilities in the county, and is ultimately sold across the UK as an organic soil conditioner called Pro-Grow.

Energy Recovery

All other household waste is sent to one of the three ERFs in the county: Portsmouth, Marchwood or Chineham near Basingstoke.

The Portsmouth site, which we toured, is a new facility, having opened in December 2006. It is capable of processing 165,000 tonnes of waste per year, and recovers heat energy from the waste to produce steam. This is used to generate up to 14MW of electricity which is supplied to the National Grid. This is sufficient to power over 20,000 local homes for the life of the facility.

Answers to some of our questions:

• "The ERF and MRF facilities in Hampshire were designed to manage household waste for the county.
• "All recyclable materials are dealt with in Hampshire.
• "There is no kerbside collection for recycling the following: Yellow Pages or old directories, Tetra Paks, plastic food trays and containers, or plastic bags - these have to go into household waste, where they will be processed at the ERF. Alternatively, there are banks for Yellow Pages (look on their website for locations) and plastic bags (most large supermarkets have one). It is worth keeping an eye out for others for different types of materials.

Future visit

We are planning a trip to the Material Recycling Facility next year ... please look out for the details in the 2008 'Walks and Talks programme'.

The CPRE office in Winchester has a number of recycling information wheels; if you were not supplied with one by your local council and you would like one, please call or email Pam or Becky on 01962 843655 (info@cprehampshire.org.uk.

November 2007