Candles landfill site visit

Volunteers from Shropshire Master Composters have been on a fact finding tour to find out where rubbish collected from homes all over Shropshire ends up.  We were kindly taken on a trip out to Little Wenlock near Telford to look at Veolias Candles Landfill site. 

The vast (19 ha.) site has been operating since 1997.  It includes both conventional and hazardous waste disposal cells and accepts mainly commercial and industrial wastes - more than 100,000 tonnes a year from around Shropshire, Telford and the Black Country areas.  In more recent years it has also become the main disposal site for about 75,000 tonnes a year of black bag rubbish from Shropshire Council.

One of the key environmental problems with a landfill site is leachate - all that rubbish rots and it gets rained on and you end up with a dirty liquid which also picks up traces of nasty pollutants present in the rubbish (like heavy metals) so it has to be controlled.  One of the green initiatives at this site is that they have their own on-site leachate treatment system.

This plant can treat 300,000 Litres of leachate per day.  The first treatment is to pass it through a sand based filter just to physically remove any suspended matter. It also gets passed through Granular Activated Carbon (GAC) to remove pollutants from the leachate.

The system not only reduces the pollution to the point that the remaining liquid can be safely discharged to the sewer for aerobic treatment but it also recycles the ammonia into a useful product (which can be used in combustion plant to reduce NOx pollution). The amonnia is removed via a process called air stripping - which is basically agitation of the water to increase the area of air to water contact. 

The landfill site also generates methane gas from the rotting rubbish.   As part of their efforts to stop this methane escaping into the environment (where it is a powerful greenhouse gas) the firm have installed a gas driven engine to generate electricity from this gas instead - it generates enough power for about 1,000 homes each year. 

Whilst we were visiting a truck arrived from Shropshire Council delivering about 40 tonnes of compacted rubbish - this happens several times a day.  It really helps to put the scale of our waste generation into context to see that amount of rubbish all just being buried.  

Despite the huge efforts put into environmental initiatives on the site, we all came away motivated to recycle and compost more and get others to do the same.  Whilst landfill will always have a role for safe and secure management of some types of non-recyclable wastes continuing to rely on landfill to the scale we do in the longer term is unsustainable and has to come to an end.

Hopefully we are now all in a position to understand the issues around landfill sites more now and help to communicate to the public why landfill is considered the least desirable option for managing our waste.  A big thanks to all the team at Veolia for arranging the visit.