Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
We recognise minimising the amount of waste we generate is one of the most effective ways we can benefit the environment so we've adopted an approach of reducing, reusing and recycling.
Here are a few of the things we're working on:
Sludge Phyto Conditioning (
SPC
): Sludge is the solid by-product of the sewage treatment process. Each year, we produce 750,000 tonnes of sludge which requires treatment and disposal at one of our treatment facilities. The innovative SPC process involves growing certain grass types on digested, conditioned sludge to develop a high-quality, topsoil substitute product which meets legislative and customer requirements. This process also enables local green waste to be recycled. We already receive around 90,000 tonnes of green waste from council collections in Bradford, Calderdale, Sheffield, Kirklees, Wakefield and Leeds which is shredded, screened and blended with our digested sludge to create the compost for phyto conditioning. This product recently won Environmental Product of the Year at the National Recycling Awards. SPC now accounts for a significant and growing percentage of all the sludge disposed of.
Facilities sites waste: We aim to reduce disposal and haulage costs by minimising waste from our head office and several of our other office sites. We recycle all cardboard, paper, cans, plastic, glass, batteries and food waste. Computer consumables are returned for reuse and the funds collected are donated to a local charity. Furniture is donated to local community organisations or to our contract partners who, in return, donate money to Wateraid. Any waste which we're unable to reuse or recycle is compacted on-site to reduce volume.
Using waste to generate electricity: We generate renewable energy from a number of sources including hydro-electric and combined heat and power (CHP) plants. Combined heat and power provides the majority of our energy generation and utilises the waste gas from our waste water treatment process. This gas is used to fuel a generator which provides significant amounts of electricty and heat for our waste water treatment works.
Operational Sites: There is an ongoing drive to divert waste away from landfill on all of our operational sites.
Innovation and Delivery: We're constantly researching ways to reduce, reuse or eliminate the wastes we produce, to minimise our impact on the environment. Such projects include ways to re-use grit that is removed during our sewage treatment process, or reusing construction waste arising from any essential road excavations.
Utility Indistry Agreement: Constructing and maintaining our assets utilises a large volume of resources and creates a significant amount of waste. That's why in 2010 we signed the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP)
Utility Industry Agreement
. By doing this we are committing to recycling an increasing amount of our excavated waste, using recycled materials to refill our excavations, and continuing to develop the technology required to reduce the amount of holes we dig in the first place. We are also really pleased that some of our contract Partners are already signing up to the utility contractor's version of this agreement.
Partners: Working closely with our contract partners plays a key role in managing and waste and resources. Together we've developed a Resource and Waste Management Procedure to ensure legal compliance and best practice is followed by everyone. We also ask our key Partners to report their waste and resource management to us so that in the near future we will be able to tell everyone how we're doing.
