A group from Coventry Society visited the new Sherbourne Recycling centre on 13th February 2024. Here is our report.Sherbourne Recycling Ltd is a new company that has taken on the processing of blue lidded bin recycling waste from eight local authorities in the West Midlands.
The company is owned by these eight local authorities and takes the “blue lidded bin” recycling waste from 1.5 million people. The eight local authorities are: Coventry, Walsall, Warwick District, North Warwickshire, Rugby, Stratford, Nuneaton and Bedworth and Solihull. The partnership is committed to working together for 25 years, avoiding the problem of short-term contracts. The company is working in partnership with Canadian sorting specialist Machinex, who have designed and installed the machinery and maintain the plant.The plant is located off London Road in Whitley on the site of former allotments next to the River Sherbourne. Its entrance is from the City Council’s Whitley depot. The plant is powered by the Waste to Energy plant on the other side of the river and solar panels on the roof of the building. Within the plant, battery operated fork lift trucks are used and the plant is seeking to be as carbon neutral as possible.
The plant separates out the different recycling elements, glass, paper and cardboard, plastic and metals. In total there are sixteen different materials processed. It is all carried out indoors to avoid water corruption. The new centre has been operational since last August and is currently in the commissioning stage. It aims to create products that are 99% pure, which can then be sold to UK companies that re-use the materials saved. This is unlike most plants which produce lower quality outputs which need to be sent overseas for further processing. The financial model is very interesting. The local authorities pay the company the full price of recycling the materials and get refunded a portion of the income from resale, allocated according to the amount and quality of the materials brought in. Local authorities therefore have an incentive to encourage their residents to put the right things into their bins.
The plant has been designed from scratch and is recognised as being innovative and at the forefront of the recycling industry in the UK. Many other local authorities are following the progress of the commissioning closely. The plant is capable of recycling 175,000 tonnes per year, although only 130,000 tonnes is being progressed at the moment. There is therefore capacity to bring other local authorities into the fold. The waste from the process is taken to a firm in Nottingham that uses it to fire cement kilns in Stoke on Trent. It cannot be sent to the Coventry Waste to Energy plant next door as that plant does not currently have capacity to receive additional materials.Most of the plant is almost fully automatic, with 18 sorting robots, 14 optical sorters and 14 AI units sorting 47.5 tonnes per hour. The SamurAI picking robot can remove 70 incorrect objects a minute, about twice the rate of a human sorter. Communication and messaging is a key issue for the business. Getting people to put the right thing into their blue lidded bin is essential. Leaving stuff in plastic bin liners is a definite “no-no” as it can’t be recycled. We also saw evidence that people had been putting bricks and stones and even batteries into their bins – all of which is not recyclable – at least not through this plant. But messaging has to come from the separate local authorities as they each have their own approach to general rubbish, green waste and food waste. So, the company’s communication officer has difficult task of encouraging all eight authorities to give out the correct message to their own constituents about recycling. Artist and CovSoc member Mary Courtney, who attended the visit, said “It was fascinating, noisy and smelly, with layers of conveyors and stairs and machines and robotic arms. If this was trip was an artwork, it would be described as a ‘full on total immersive visual, sound and olfactory experience’.“
You can watch a video about Sherbourne Recycling here.