BACKGROUND
This page covers:
- What is being proposed to be built
- The team behind the application
- The technology proposed
LRV are trying to get planning permission to construct the largest waste to energy and recycling centre in Europe.
This massive facility will:
- Cover 27 hectares (equivalent to 27 international rugby pitches and almost six times the size of the new Southern General super hospital).
- Have several huge buildings (8m high) and 14 chimneys each 65 metre (200 foot) high, supporting generators, plasma incinerators, waste sorting halls, effluent storage tanks, car parks, offices, lorry parks, electricity substation and water storage tanks
- Process at least 1.5 million tonnes of solid commercial and industrial waste
- Burn at least 60% of this waste through ‘gasification’ (furnaces to you and me)
- A proportion of the waste that isn’t otherwise combustible and by-products from gasification will be burnt at very high temperatures using plasma arc technology, which is relatively new to waste management
- Use heat from gasification furnaces to generate electricity via turbines to be sold on to the national grid
- The smaller part of the rubbish received on site, which cannot be burnt, will be sorted for recycling
The team behind the application
The Managing Director of LRV is businessman Brian Kilgour. Kilgour is an Ayrshire businessman currently living in East Renfrewshire. His previous business ‘Planet Waste’ was sold on and essentially transported waste in trucks to landfill and other sites. Kilgour was convicted by SEPA for a waste-related offence due to poor practice by his company (see http://www.sepa.org.uk/about_us/news/2009/waste_offences_cost_ayrshire_w.aspx for details.
Kilgour appears to have no prior experience of the scale of operation or types of process engineering required under LRV’s incinerator proposals.
The other members of the LRV team are:
- Neil Gallacher, Managing Director – he has a background in developing international trade and industrial links but no apparent experience in either designing or managing an industrial-scale waste management plant.
- Willy Findlater, Chief Development Officer – an architect whose firm Custom Design Practice specialised in housing, offices, listed historic and community buildings. He has no obvious engineering, scientific, industry or waste management experience.
- Chris Williams, Chief Information Officer – the only member of the management team who can be said to have any relevant technical experience and often used as LRV’s spokesman for that reason. Nevertheless, the Peterborough Energy from Waste Incinerator on which his expertise is based has still not been built and is less than half the size of what is planned for East Renfrewshire.
The Technology Proposed
In general the technology proposed for the LRV incinerator is relatively new and untested. It is very complex and there are very few examples in use in the UK. We have collated all the detail in a separate document for those of you who wish to know more (we will publish this shortly) to allow us to get the site up sooner) but have listed the key points below:
- LRV’s incinerator proposal is based on gasification and plasma arc technology to reduce solid organic waste – taken from commercial and industrial sources across 11 local authority areas - to ash and syngas (a waste gas). These are not new technologies within process industries, but are still very new in the waste industry where consistency of input materials is difficult, if not impossible, to control.
- Scrubbers’ and other filtration measures will remove the majority of other harmful elements from the syngas before it is fed to a conventional boiler and steam turbine plant to produce electricity. The combusted syngas - primarily water vapour and carbon dioxide - is released into the atmosphere
Despite LRV’s attempts make local communities believe that the incinerator technologies they want to use are completely problem-free, this is not the case:
- Not even new technology incinerators or ‘scrubbers’ prevent the release of dioxins, furans and other toxins into the atmosphere. Dioxins in particular are extremely harmful to human and animal health even in minute quantities and have been seen to have detrimental cumulative effects on public health at many locations around the world. IT IS KNOWN THAT LONG TERM EXPOSURE TO THESESUBSTANCES IS A CAUSE OF CANCER.
- Plasma arc burning of generally non-inflammable waste types depends on mixing it with combustible material such as paper, wood and foodstuffs. This means that material that can actually be recycled has to be taken out of recycling streams and burned in order to make the process viable. In effect, incineration actively diminishes recycling efforts.
- Although LRV state that the technology is “proven,” the reality is that it has only been actively employed in waste management for five or six years. No comprehensive evaluation of its effectiveness has been carried out, nor is there any real understanding of its long term environmental and public health effects.
A review of available data indicates that at least until 2010, the maximum capacity of individual plants of this type in operation worldwide is less than half the size of the proposed LRV plant. UK plants are a fraction of this size, and the main UK equipment suppliers are still experimenting with pilot plant.
Another of the main problems in trying to assess the effectiveness technically and commercially of waste to energy schemes is that most of the available information comes from enterprises that are either operating such facilities or propose to do so – there are few independent or dispassionate sources of information. In short, it is in operators’ and developers’ financial interest to convince you that modern incinerators are harmless.
The truth is much more alarming and you can find good information at:
Additionally, regulators freely admit that their criteria and methods for measurement of the environmental performance of waste to energy systems are currently not up to scratch. Recent incidents in Scotland where emission regulations have been breached on a gross scale by failing incinerator and filtration technology also reveal that regulators in this country have nowhere near the necessary resources to ‘police’ incinerators once they are built.
