Island 2000 Trust Blog

Don’t forget to come along to the fabulous WoodWarming expo at Newport Football Club tomorrow and saturday. There’ll be everything you need to know about switching to wood fuel: boilers, stoves, chips and pellets and all the other bits and pieces. There will be experts and suppliers from the Island and the mainland ready to answer all of your questions.  See you there!

I’ve been playing at the wordle website.  This is a word cloud generated by wordle from the latest Gift to Nature posts.  Click on the image for a bigger version.

Ooh everyone loves a good trip to the tip, don’t they?  that lovely smug feeling from de-cluttering your life and disposing of your unwanted goods in the proper manner, preferably with a hefty dollop of recycling thrown in.  So staff at Island 2000 were privileged to be given a deluxe tour of both the recycling plant on Forest Road and the landfill site at Lynbottom recently.

Island Waste’s Community Liaison Officer, Lynn Clarke took a group of us around the site to see first hand all the new recycling technology and the gasification chambers, which sound slightly sinister, but when working at full capacity they will produce enough energy to power approx 3,000 homes, simply by burning un-recyclable rubbish and selling the resulting energy to the National Grid.

We were surprised to discover just how much of our domestic rubbish is recycled on the Island.  Although newspapers, magazines, food waste and glass is collected at kerbside, the remainder of recycleable material is extracted at the plant.

Look at this pile of bales of squashed aluminium cans - can you see the face that Island Waste staff have created in the pile in a light-hearted moment?

Only material that cannot be recycled or used to make fuel for gasification is sent on to the landfill site at Lynbottom.  As well as the landfill facility, the Lynbottom site collects garden waste which is turned into high quality garden compost and sold locally.  Kitchen food waste is also collected here and is broken down into a low grade compost material which is used to cover the landfill area at the end of each day.

We also took a quick peep at the birds of prey that are brought onto the site every day and flown to deter seagulls and other vermin from the area.  After having seen all the excellent recycling and waste reduction techniques on the site, it was still pretty daunting to see the vast landfill area in use at Lynbottom.  The current space available in this landfill is due to last until 2015, and Lynn reckons they’ll just about manage it, but what happens after that is anyone’s guess, particularly as Island Waste’s contract ends in 2015.

The message is pretty clear - whatever you throw away will be dealt with responsibly and effectively by Island Waste, who will do their utmost to minimise what goes into landfill, but we also have to do our bit in managing our waste, both in our bins and what we take up to the tip.