Greater Manchester's first major facility is operational.

As part of our ongoing commitment to provide state of the art recycling and waste treatment facilities for Greater Manchester, we have now officially opened the first new major facility under the contract. Opened in November, it marked an important milestone for the project and is the start of a new network of many major recycling and treatment facilities to be completed over the coming months and years.

The Waithlands Resource Recovery Centre in Rochdale which includes a new In-Vessel Composting Facility (IVC), a new Transfer Loading Station (TLS) and an upgraded Household Waste Recycling Centre (HWRC) has been under construction since January 2008, and has now opened its doors to project partners and householders.

The IVC facility will treat kerbside collected garden and kitchen waste within an enclosed building, to create a compost material for use in horticulture and agriculture. Over the last few months the facility has been accepting sample loads of green and kitchen waste so that the equipment and treatment process could be tested.

State-of-the-Art Recycling Facility close to completion.

The Material Recovery Facility (MRF), under construction by Viridor Laing (Greater Manchester) Ltd, is well on the way to being ready to process and sort all of Greater Manchester’s mixed recycling (glass, cans and plastic bottles).

The MRF has been under construction since early April 2009. At the end of October 2009, the building work was completed and the installation of the internal equipment has now begun.The MRF uses a range of state-of-the-art preparation and separation technologies to sort the mixed recycling material into each material type, resulting in separate fractions of glass, cans and plastic bottles ready for recycling.

As the mixed recycling material enters the process, there is an initial check to remove any unwanted items that have been accidently put into a recycling collection. A large overband magnet separates out any steel cans and an eddy current separator removes the aluminium cans and foil. Glass is then separated out by a trommel which acts like a large sieve, sorting the small fractions of glass from the remaining plastic bottles. All of the plastic bottles finally go into an automated separator unit that has the capability to divide them into the following different types: HDPE and clear PET bottles and mixed plastic bottles.

Specialist state of the art processing technology has been transported in containers from San Diego, USA. A total of 28 containers carrying sections of the equipment, including conveyor and travel belts, trommels, magnets and eddy current separators took a month to travel to the UK. The containers are being stored at Felixstowe Docks, before being transported up to Manchester by rail and then to the Longley lane site in Sharston, Manchester, by road.

First Mechanical Biological Treatment (MBT) Facility on schedule.

The Reliance Street Resource Recovery Centre in North Manchester will be home to the very first operational Mechanical Biological Treatment facility with Anearobic Digestion. The facility has been under construction since the start of the contract in April 2009 and is due to be complete in June 2010. It will then go throught a 6 month testing and comissioning programme to ensure operations run to required standards. Many of the additional buildings being constructed on site are well underway with  steelwork complete and the work on digester tanks progressing fast. Work on the foundations and roof structures are now complete.  

Factsheets explaining all...

We have developed 5 different factsheets to help you understand the different recycling and waste treatment technologies we will be using to treat your waste across Greater Manchester. The factsheets cover; the existing technologies of Landfill and Thermal Recovery together with the new technolgies; Mechanical Biological Treatment, In Vessel Composting and Materials Recovery. A final fact sheets discusses what the overall solution aims to achive and deliver. All 6 factsheets can be found on the website by visiting the our waste solution page and clicking on the topic you are interested in.

Satisfaction is Sky High across the Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRC).

During September 2009 satisfaction surveys were undertaken across Greater Manchester's HWRC network. In total 3,468 site users were surveyed across nine sites. The survey assessed customer satisfaction levels across a number of different topics. The survey results revealed that 99.6% of respondents stated they were either ‘very satisfied’ or ‘quite satisfied’ with the site overall, a significant achievement considering the extensive redevelopment programme in place across a number of sites.

We’re committed to providing the best possible service we can to our customers at all times and this survey underpins this. It’s important that we talk to people and find out their views on the service we provdie and see if there are any ways that we can improve in the future. 

Surveys will be carried out at regular intervals to ensure we continue to deliver a high quality service that residents want.

New and improved HWRCs receive postive public feedback.

We have also been capturing users’ views and opinions on the redeveloped HWRCs. We're very pleased with what residents have to say. We have had an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the users of the HWRCs complimenting the new service we now provide.

Just a few examples of the hunders of comments we have had:

Jean Clatworthy from Bury was very impressed “This is much better. It gives us more choice when recycling and has not taken very long at all. I am very impressed”

James Bowden says “This is what you want. The site is very well laid out. I used to loathe coming to the tip and now it’s safe and tidy and I don’t mind at all”.