SUEZ site-seeing | Part 3 | West London, waste transfer stations
24th November 2017
Dr Adam Read, External Affairs Director, continued his backstage tour of SUEZ sites this week visiting two transfer stations in West London to see the source of the waste that is recovered at Severnside Energy Recovery Centre (SERC) . Adam is putting together a series of short blogs giving you a flavour of what goes on at each of the sites he visits.
Third stop – West London, waste transfer stations.
The next day I was off to West London to check out where the waste journey starts for the feedstocks arriving at Servernside, namely the two waste transfer stations at Victoria Road in Ruislip and Transport Avenue in Brentford.
These two sites came across as part of the West London contract, which has been operational for the last couple of years.
The two sites process 360,000 tonnes per annum of residual waste from the six London Boroughs that form part of the West London Waste Authority. Every year 57,000 tonnes is sent to Lakeside, the energy-from-waste facility (EfW) near Heathrow whilst the remaining 300,000 tonnes is transported by rail to Severnside energy recovery centre by a train that runs every night.
In the last 12 months the sites have shifted from bulking and transporting residual waste to landfill by rail, to feeding the new Severside EfW plant. As a part of this there has been significant attention on oversized items and quality checking loads arriving to ensure nothing unwanted ends up at the EfW plant, which may cause potential shut downs.
The two sites are quite old, forming part of the GLC strategy for London back in the 1970s, they operate very different systems. Victoria road uses cranes and bunkers to lift the waste and fill the containers prior to loading the train, whereas Transport Avenue has eight hopper bays in the tipping hall where refuse collection vehicles (RCVs) can tip direct into the containers.
Transport Avenue is the busier of the two sites, taking 1,000 tonnes per day and 200 lorry movements including 100 RCV tips.
Given the age of the sites, the amount of materials being handled and the number of lorry movements, the site was clean, well-managed and the staff were very committed to improving quality systems and procedures.
My next stop is back out to the west, stopping off at Leatherhead Community Recycling Centre (CRD) and the Reuse shop.
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