Where does the rubbish go?

Stroud Evening Women’s Institute (WI) went to Veolia’s energy recovery facility in Portsmouth to find out.

All the recyclable rubbish from Hampshire – all 150,000 tons of it – comes to this plant and the sites at Marchwood and Alton and the amount is truly astonishing.

Everything comes into a holding area and is transferred from there via moving belts where certain types of rubbish are removed, some by hand (a small amount) others like paper by blowers and tins by magnets, while plastic is sorted by infra-red beams.

Anything that can be used, like tins, is baled and sent to other plants in the country where they are processed.

The non-recyclable waste is tipped into bunkers then grabbed by an enormous grabber a ton at a time and sent to be burnt on site. The grate is so hot that the waste is completely burnt to ash.

Any useful bits left in the ash are removed for recycling and the rest is used to make road bases.

The gases created by this burning are cleaned, anything usable removed and the residue released up the tall chimney as steam.

The plant generates 16MWs of electricity of which it needs only two, so the remaining 14 are sold to the grid to help pay for the running of the plant.

In this way Hampshire can proudly boast that everything recycled in the county is used, and none of our landfill sites have been used for 14 years.