As new research shows incinerating household rubbish is the UK’s dirtiest way to make power, Milton Keynes City Council has announced it sent no waste to landfill in the last quarter thanks to its cleaner and greener gasification plant.
Milton Keynes City Council opened its Waste Recovery Park in 2017. The plant can process 133,000 tonnes of black bin/sack waste each year, enough to create power for 11,000 homes (nearly 10% of MK’s homes). Today, the city council uses some of that power to run its state-of-the-art fleet of electric waste trucks.
Gasification is far greener and more efficient than incinerators, which power turbines that make electricity by burning waste. In Milton Keynes, waste that can’t be recycled is boiled at high temperatures to create what’s called syngas. Unlike incineration, this doesn’t create greenhouse gases or nitrogen oxides. The Recovery Park also treats waste mechanically to extract metals and plastics for recycling and creates helpful compost through anaerobic digestion.
Ten years ago, the forward-thinking city council invested in its site at Old Wolverton to build the Waste Recovery Park as part of its commitment to sustainability. It typically diverts more than 99% of what Milton Keynes throws away from landfill, but in the last quarter, the city council reported that no waste had been sent to landfill at all.
Milton Keynes has a long history of environmentally friendly initiatives. In 1992, it became the first place in the UK to collect recycling from the kerbside. Last year, the city council rolled out red and blue recycling bins in a nod to its historic red and blue box system.
Since then, recycling rates have risen by more than a third, zooming Milton Keynes up the ranks of the cities that recycle most across England, and bucking the trend that councils in the UK are recycling less and incinerating more. In MK, around 65% of waste is currently recycled. The English average is around 44%.
“Yet again, Milton Keynes is leading the way for greener and cleaner initiatives. We believe in reuse and recycling, but where that isn’t possible, we’re able to divert waste from landfill without the need for incineration. Your council thought ahead to invest in sustainable technology ten years ago, and we did it again last year by modernising our weekly waste collections. We’ll keep innovating so our city can keep making a positive contribution to tackling climate change.”