Machinery to process waste due in few weeks

States’ Trading Assets staff were joined by project manager Amec Foster Wheeler and contractor Geomarine as the media were given a chance to look around the £32m. facility.

Once completed, the building will house three waste handling streams dealing with glass, general refuse and food waste.

Richard Evans, the senior responsible officer for the waste implementation programme, said construction had gone smoothly to this point.

The next major phase will be the arrival of the machinery and processing equipment in the coming weeks.

‘We want to start commissioning and properly testing all the kit from October,’ he said.

It is estimated that when it is operating at full capacity, the facility will handle some 1,800-2,000 tonnes of glass waste each year, about 4,000 tonnes of food waste and 26,000 of general waste.

Infrastructure project manager Susanna Durman said the facility will be split into three main bays.

The first, and largest, will contain the processing equipment and glass sorting, the next one will be where black bags are deposited and the third will be for food waste.

There will be five days’-worth of storage of black bag waste, should it be needed.

Contractors who are depositing waste there will have to go through the recently-laid weighbridge, which will register their number plate, who they are working for and weigh the amount of refuse being transported.

Mr Evans said the facility was probably the main thing that people associated with the waste strategy because of its size. However, there was just as much work going on behind closed doors.

‘We have been organising and coordinating with the people who are receiving the waste, negotiating a contract for ongoing clearance, negotiated a service level agreement with States Works, in addition to all of the work with the parishes and their contractors and communicating the strategy so that people know what night their collections will be,’ he said.

‘In terms of what Guernsey’s construction industry is doing, this project is good for Guernsey.’

The changes to household recycling collections will coincide with the commissioning of the new waste transfer station, which will process materials prior to export for recycling, energy recovery or disposal.

Separately-collected food waste will in future be pre-processed at the transfer station, but will then be exported to a specialist facility in the south of England.

The new collections will begin from 2 September. However, the pay-as-you-go system will not cost users until until 2019.

It is estimated that the average cost of waste and recycling collections, processing and treatment, will be £6 per week per household.

Thousands of recycling kits are being delivered to homes ahead of the changes to collections in September.

Guernsey Post will deliver more than 26,000 kits between now and the middle of August, so that every household has all the equipment they require before new services start.