The Eco Park – State of play, residents’ concerns and discarded batteries
The recent meeting of the Suez Eco Park Community Liaison Group, on which LoSRA is represented, started with a brief tour of the Gasifier installation. The Gasifier had been running since its commissioning in August, but had unfortunately had to be shut down the previous day due to a failure of one of the main pumps in the system. It was therefore not working for our visit, which nonetheless demonstrated what a very complex plant it is.
Given that its initial input is black bag waste, one of its major challenges is to separate out all the non-burnable parts be it metal, ceram-ics or food. What is left is chopped into bits no larger than 80mm in size; this is screw-fed into the fluidised-bed combustor, which ulti-mately produces steam to power a turbine connected to an electricity generator. There are multiple sections of the plant dedicated to removing the nasty bits from the flue gases before discharging them to the atmosphere via the infamous ‘chimney’.
There have been 88 complaints about smell from ‘local’ residents, very few of which were deemed likely to have come from the site; none of these have been substantiated by the Environment Agency. There have been 53 noise complaints from local residents, primari-ly about loud alarms going off in the plant.
The Refuse Bulking Facility (aka the ‘dump’!) had a fire in August in one of the storage bays, possibly due to an over-heating discarded battery and exacerbated by the hot weather. The installed sprinkler system was ineffective, but the Fire Brigade responded rapidly and no significant damage was caused. The point was made that discarded batteries in general waste represent an increasingly serious safety issue.