Environmental Sustainability is at the heart of many CSR or ESG plans but when your job is to refurbish social housing to improve the wellbeing and safety of residents, you can’t help but generate waste.
Environmental Sustainability – Construction Waste Recycling
Not many people will be aware, but situated around the M25 are dedicated construction waste recycling centres that receive waste from across London and use laser automation technology to help sift and sort waste into streams that can be recycled or reused.
PiLON is a main contractor specialising in refurbishments and electrical testing of social housing across London and the South East. They have numerous clients, who are either local authorities or social housing providers and each has a sprawling estate that requires ongoing modernisation and refitting. The most common areas to refurbish are kitchens, bathrooms and toilets but these can’t be done without generating waste in the form of sinks, toilets, baths, cabinets, taps and electrical wiring.
At home, most of us are used to either adding mixed recycling into a dedicated wheelie bin or separating different types of materials into inidvidual bins. With limited space in London (and many residential areas), separating waste streams from construction projects is very difficult because each would require its own skip, which is why PiLON and others rely on businesses such as Powerday to collect and sort the waste at their dedicated sites on the outskirts of London.
I visited one of their sites near Willesden in London which processes around 200,000 tonnes of waste every year.
Once delivered, the waste is placed onto huge conveyor belts where magnets, rollers and industrial sized sieves, sort and sift the waste into materials, weights and sizes.
Metal, cardboard, wood, and rigid plastics are all compressed and baled for recycling. Hardcore, including old tiles and bricks are crushed to be reused as aggregate. What’s left, which is usually soft plastics and contaminated materials, are used for energy – much is sold to a paper factory in Germany who burn their own fuel to keep their paper mills running.
Environmental sustainability is a priority for many businesses and complex supply chains mean that organisations need to work together to tackle these big issues. This is the circular economy in action – genuine waste products that are the byproduct of improving lives are being recycled and reused. The small amount that can’t be efficiently sorted into contaminate-free streams (wood without metal, metal without plastic etc) becomes waste for energy, either at a regional incinerator or a local business that operates it’s own off-grid system.
What did I learn? That soft plastic is the enemy of efficient recycling – it can contaminate other waste streams simply by being stuck, glued, or somehow adhered to other materials that means sophisticated sorting machines can’t separate the two materials. For now, these unsorted materials can be burned for energy but the aim must be to phase-out all soft plastics which would improve the recycling success of all other materials.
What the images convey are the story of waste. Waste that is skipped, collected, sorted and packaged ready to be recycled or reused. To find out more about telling visual stories on subjects such as environmental sustainability, CSR and ESG get in touch here or read my short booklet about Sustainability Communications by clicking here.
