New innovation to help NI meet EU targets
Portadown-based recycling company, Natural World Products Ltd (NWP), has developed an innovative product which it says will reduce the amount of waste materials being sent to landfill in Northern Ireland by between 35-75 percent.
The company has state-of-the-art facilities in both Portadown and Belfast which facilitate the extraction of recyclable materials from household waste streams. This allows for the manufacture of Engineered Fuels (EngFuels) from the non-recyclable fraction of household waste. NWP has now leased a new staging area at Belfast Harbour from which it will ship 100,000 tonnes of EngFuel this year alone. Also benefitting from this new relationship is Jenkins Shipping Company, which transports the bales to Holland and Germany where they are processed in a plant and converted into energy.
According to NWP Operations Director Caolan Woods, the manufactured ‘EngFuels’ will help NI meet EU-led targets to reduce the levels of bio-degradable house waste going to landfill to just 35% of 1995 levels by 2020 and avoid heavy EU fines. He said: “Using our innovative new system, material that could previously only have been sent to landfill can now be carefully refined and processed into a high quality energy resource. It is all part of our key message; ‘4R Future – Reduce/Reuse/Recycle/Recover’.
“We are partnering with local councils across Northern Ireland to help meet targets for a reduction in landfill usage, as set out in the European Landfill Directive. We have worked closely with the Northern Ireland Environment Agency to ensure that our EngFuel is engineered to the highest possible standards, with a demonstrable audit trail for full duty of care traceability.”
NWP has developed sustainable markets throughout Europe for a variety of different fuel grades tailored for end-user requirements. This partnership with Belfast Harbour will consolidate existing jobs and the storage facility will allow for a shipment of 3,000 tonnes of EngFuel every two weeks.
Engineered Fuels Manager, Gavin Doherty said: “With current issues such as the rise of landfill tax affecting Northern Ireland, EngFuel is a cost-effective and efficient method of driving a sustainable reduction in the use of landfill and therefore generating savings for the local economy. We are able to ship 100,000 tonnes of waste per year to be converted to energy – this is equivalent to a vast amount of landfill space. In addition to a sustainable service, we offer customers the comfort of satisfying duty of care requirements.”
