Visit to Tudor Griffiths Landfill

A bunch of us Master Composters, along with some members of Shrewsbury Friends of the Earth, Shropshire Organic Gardeners and Shropshire Community Recycling Ltd, recently paid a visit to the Tudor Griffiths landfill site near Ellesmere. 

This business manages over 75,000 tonnes of mainly construction and demolition waste from the Shropshire and Cheshire area each year.  The site includes the operation of a non-hazardous waste landfill site alongside recycling and sand and gravel extraction operations.  The company also operates commercial waste collection, skip hire, haulage, concrete and building merchant businesses which compliment each other in an intergrated manner.

The company has recently been successful in appliying for over £200,000 grant from the governments Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP) which has gone towards the contruction of a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) at their landfill site in Ellesmere, Shropshire.

As a result of this, all skip material from their skip hire business (which previously would have gone straight to landfill) is first taken to this MRF for pre-treatment.  As a result over 90% of the material is now being recycled which is pretty incredible recovery rates by any standard. 

Part of the reason for the very high recycling rates is that over 40% of all the waste coming into the site is just soil and rubble from construction sites.   Most of this can be pretty simply screened off by passing the material through a trommel.  This fraction of the waste stream is extremely useful for running a landfill site as it can be used for on site engineering operations, stablisation of land, roadbuilding and daily cover which is required. 

But also some of this is sold on as recycled aggregates and some is done using reverse haulage, so its send back to the building sites in the very same skips which their waste arrived in! 

Once the heavy and rocky fraction of the waste has been removed the material gets sent through the MRF where recyclable materials such as tyres, plastics, metals and wood, are initially removed by hand picking.  

Ferrous metals are easily removed with magnets and this happens repeatedly at each stage of the operation.  Even the little nails present in wood and hinges and knobs off kitchen units and doors get removed at the wood shredding stage with magnets.  The wood then gets sold on to Kronospan at their local factory in Chirk which makes MDF (medium density fibreboard).

They showed us one of the new cells which is being prepared for future landfilling.  The entire stetch is first lined with a plastic liner, to keep all the nasty stuff well contained, its like making a garden pond!  An even here they are recycling, using shredded car tyres which is replacing other construction materials, for a lightweight backfill material in their leachate collection system.

Thats very important because once operational the site will hold thousands of tonnes every year of black bag waste collected from their business collections as well as rejects from the MRF.  The rubbish gets deposited on the landfill in thin layers, which are subjected to compaction by a 42 tonne purpose built compactor machine with steel toothed wheels. 

But of course this rubbish rots and it gets rained on and it produces a dirty liquid called leachate which has to be managed very seriously because of the sensitive watercourses nearby.  All the leachate gets collected up into big tanks and is taken to the sewage treatment works in Monkmoor, Shrewsbury to be treated and made safe.

Another environmental initiative on the site is the capture and recovery of methane.  In the past landfill sites used to vent this gas direct to the atmosphere where is acts as a powerful greenhouse gas exacerbating global warming.  However due to increasing regulation these sites now have to capture this gas and it makes sense economically to recover energy from it.

The Wood Lane site burns the gas in a 1MW generator and produces enough electricity to power around 300 homes.  They are currently investigating the potential to also utilise the waste heat from this operation for drying wood and so this would be both a more efficient power process but also improving the quality and value of their recyclate as a result.

Its clear that the entire business operation at this site has been transformed in the past few years.  They have gone from being a landfill operation to a predominantly recycling based waste management operation.  They are increasingly not just a waste management business but a resource management company with reclaimed aggregates now being a fundamental part of their business alongside the virgin material which they extract.

Everyone was very impressed by the dedication and professionalism of the staff on site and their commitment to minimising environmental impacts of their operation.  What they showed us was that a well managed landfill site can peacefull co-exist both with a sensitive local nature reserve but also with the local community.

A big thank you has to go to our hosts from Tudor Griffiths who gave up hours of their time to give us and excellent guided tour of the facility and to Judy from Shrewsbury FoE for organising what was a fascinating trip.