Every time I drive down the M5 past Junction 12 with Gloucester behind me and Bristol up ahead there is a looming green armadillo on my left. The steaming cream stack throwing out plumes of greyish vapour means that somewhere, deep in her viridescent belly, our unrecyclable detritus is being burned at 850 °C.

It also means I’m less than 10 minutes from home. Most days my husband (Mr TMM) points her out “ohh look, she’s scuttled away!”, “look how near she is!” or “she sure is big today!”

This led me to believe that there may be 3 of us in this marriage. So, dutifully, I called Gloucestershire Energy from Waste and organised a tour; to celebrate our 2^nd wedding anniversary on a damp Tuesday .. deep in the hidden quarters of his metal mistress.

If you have seen it, there is no doubt you know what I’m talking about.

Locals are split. Is it a Lego-like defacement destroying our skyline? A giant Air fryer? K9 from Dr Who? An atrocious and drunken aardvark dealing crudely with the products of our conspicuous consumerism?

Or, is it something more benign? If you look at it, head at an angle, squint and employ optimism: it does kind of reflect the landscape behind it. The architect pitched “a place with its own identity.” Design & Access Statement Jan 2012 A.pub (gloucestershire.gov.uk) We can agree on that.

We arrive:

We turn up and wait in the reception of the administration block. The air thick with a sweet, new-born’s nappy smell mixed with the smudgy air that an overfull hoover spits out. Gritty tasting but not entirely unpleasant. It leaves you with the sense that it is gathering behind your ears and under your nails.

We are met by Melanie our effervescent guide. She is font of knowledge about all things recycling and ‘energy recovery’ (NOT waste disposal she reiterates.) She acknowledges the fragrance and tells us that its only the admin block that smells cause “someone has the fans in the wrong direction.” It’s being looked at.

Other tour members are refuse enthusiasts, engineers and their other halves. Strangely, no one else was there for their wedding anniversary. We all sit around a table in an immaculate conference room ready for our presentation. Around the room are things that have been found in the bottom ash of the incinerator: A shot put, Singer sewing machine, horse shoes, gas bottle and the metal parts of a shovel.

Melanie gave us a 50 minute talk all about energy, waste, burning things, recovering things, getting fined for things and telling us emphatically that Urbaser and Balfour Beatty (and the unnamed American investment company) who own and run the place are committed to producing the cleanest energy recovery possible.  And, that what comes out of the large chimney at Javelin Park is (almost) only steam.

Gloucester Energy From Waste started operating Oct 2019 and is built on the site of Moreton Valance Airfield where The Gloster Javelin (hence the name) had its test flights (FYI –airplane nerd and incinerator-fancier Mr TMM has informed me that every flight used in excess of 4.5 Tonnes of kerosine.)  Maybe the place just has a thing for burning hydrocarbons. Also, the M5 is built bang on top of one of the 3 runways, hence why it’s so straight at Junction 12.

I couldn’t figure out how to tell you about the processes at the site without creating a GCSE Geography coursework mood. No one needs to be taken back there.  So, I have added a few facts in a footnote for you to peruse.

The tour:

Whilst we were still in the carpeted, and slightly stinky administration block we were taken to a window where we could look down and see bin lorries dwarfed to the size of toys reversing to the hilt of the bunker, and pushing their consignments into a vast holding pen of rubbish.

This was then ready to be mixed and picked by giant claws hanging from the roof. Each claw nips up 4 tonnes of our leavings.

We then went through an unmarked door, walked down a few galvanised steps and entered the hall that surrounded the burning conveyor. It has a polished, immaculate floor, silver tubes, boxes, coated wires, stairs that vault cathedral like up to a high roof. It is clean, light, the air warm and the process entirely hidden behind a Pompidou like structure.

 

There were endless rivets, joints, stainless vents leading who knows where? I couldn’t quite believe that every seal worked and that every weld would hold.

Disastrous questions spill from my mouth– none of them fully answered above the noise and through our earplugs – what if it overheats? Could it explode? Is there any way that a person could end up in the bunker? How do you turn it off??

We walk to the end of the burning grate; an enormous oven with a metal conveyor belt at its base. It was like an industrial level hotel toaster! Only this toaster, much to my delight, had a gas bottle that had not been removed on it. I looked through the envelope sized window at a luminous orange glow then ‘bang’ a gas canister exploded, right in front of my eyes spilling a white-hot flame and then blocking our porthole with black smoke. “We get those more often than you’d imagine” grinned Melanie “weirdly people put them in their bins at home”

(Just before we got told off for taking photos.)

We walk to the generator room. More enormous hardware and, Melanie pointed out ‘the gearbox’ which was another roof height blue metal box, with green pipes… and left us to look around whilst she sheltered from the noise in the doorway. We were on our own! I was mesmerised by the easily in reach levers, wondering what might happen were I to accidentally turn one.

The place was mostly devoid of people, a man passed us on a ride on floor polisher, putting out slip-hazard signs like breadcrumbs behind him. We were told that the rest of the staff were either training, or in the control room. I imagined it to be a Houston type set up, with lots of combustion mixologists in white coats and mathematical minds titrating the air, heat and fuel to an exact temperature.

Mr TMM took a rather less romantic approach, saying “meh, they will all be playing cards watching a computer do the work.” That may have been true though, considering it only takes 4 people to run the whole operation. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to go in to look. Probably a good idea given my mounting urge to press buttons.

It all ended up, to my non mechanical mind, looking rather similar. It was clear that the outside of the building and its sections represent the changing processes that go on inside from bunker to stack.  After a look at the flue gas filters (yellow woven socks that catch the nasties) and a trip outside in the rain to have a quick look at the transformer and the chimney we return to our classroom and give back our Hi-Viz.

At the end of the tour we are offered handfuls of pens, pencils, plastic water bottles and bags emblazoned with Urbaser’s old logo. They are set for a rebrand so they were obsolete, the irony here was not lost!

It was a fun few hours! I mean, how do you beat an anniversary trip inside a Jawa Sandcrawler? Perhaps Port Talbot for our 3^rd?

 

Tell Me More… GCSE Coursework edition:

You can find all the stats and how the incinerator works on their website.

They burn all our black bag waste as well as the ‘bulky’ items including 10 mattresses a day.

Charity shops are allowed to burn their waste for free however they have to try and sell it first. Local hospice Longfield have to have every item for at least 6 weeks in each shop before it is classed as waste.

Waste from the bunker gets burned on a conveyor grate for about an hour with the fuel and temperature and airflow being regulated the control room.  Water pipes run alongside the hot flue gas to create steam (later superheated to 427degrees) to run the turbines.

It only takes 4 people to run the place!

From 190,000 Tonnes of partially renewable waste burned per year GEFW produces 5 products:

• Electricity 19MW sold to the National Grid which is enough to run > 25000 homes
• Ferrous metal collected by a magnetic separator
• Non-ferrous metals collected with an eddy current separator
• Aggregate made of cooled, sieved Incinerator Bottom Ash and used as sub bases for roads
• Heat which, could be used – as they do in Europe- to provide hot water to any homes within 2-3 km. But they can’t do this yet. It would be cool though.

There is 1 by-product that has to go to landfill “Air Pollution Control Residue”: a fine alkaline dust comprised of lime, carbon, dioxins, chlorides, metals and other unfriendly sounding chemicals that clean the flue gases after physical filtration has occurred. We were assured that “not a lot” of APCR goes to landfill. It’s 3% and it goes to Augean | Hazardous Waste Services | Multiple Sites Across UK for processing.

Because of this filtration system we were told (at least 8 times) that all that comes from the stack is steam. Pure steam, and that any discolouration of said steam, is merely reflected from the surrounding clouds and landscapes…. Their website states that it is steam and cleaned flue gases.