Displaying items by tag: Tidy Planet

Macclesfield-based Tidy Planet has shipped four of its A900 Rocket Composters and a bespoke Dehydra Dewatering system to an oilfield in Kazakhstan, to compost the site’s 255 annual tonnes of food waste.

Situated in Western Kazakhstan in the Burlin region, the remote 50km² facility is a major producer of oil and gas and has 4,000 employees working on the premises at any one time.

Its workers’ camps and canteens generate a quarter of a kilotonne of food waste every year, from staff plate scrapings, and prior to investing in an on-site composting solution, this material was sent for a combination of incineration and landfill – in the absence of any commercial food waste processing sites that could accept the waste.

The new equipment – procured and operated by Demtec Solutions – will, for the first time, enable the oilfield to convert its wastage into compost, reducing the greenhouse gas emissions associated with incineration and pushing the organic waste stream further up the Waste Hierarchy.

Commenting on the new project, Tidy Planet’s sales manager, Huw Crampton, said: “There’s hardly any infrastructure yet available to process food waste in Kazakhstan, so when the law recently changed around how it could be dealt with, this prompted our client to invest in a process that treated it as close to its source as possible.”

In January this year, Kazakhstan brought in a new law which prohibits the burying of food waste – to help combat the country’s five million tonnes of solid waste being landfilled every year.

Huw continued: “Demtec is a waste management contractor to the oilfield, so when the law changed, the team built a new composting facility a stone’s throw away from where the waste is produced. As a result, this avoids excessive transportation – reducing the firm’s carbon emissions and eliminating off-site disposal costs.

“The nutrient-rich compost will also enable the site to sequester 70 tonnes of physical carbon into the surrounding soils each year – removing the CO2 from our atmosphere. It’s a better solution than any off-site process could ever have offered.”

Bakhitzhan Setzhanov, director at Demtec Solutions, also added: “With the new laws surrounding what we can do with food waste, we wanted to find an environmentally friendly solution that we could also use on other projects.

“We saw that the Rockets were already being used on other oilfields, so it made sense to look at learning more about the equipment. We’ve never made compost before, but when we realised that we could do it on site – treating our wastage at source – it was something we definitely wanted to pursue.

Bakhitzhan continued: “We’ve done some research into composting and know that the quality of the output is important. So, we asked Tidy Planet to build our dewatering unit into a special inspection bench – where our team will handpick all the non-compostable items from the food waste before it’s fed to the composters. This way we know that the product we make is clean and good for the soil.”

Huw concluded: “With temperatures ranging from -40°C in winter to +40°C in the summer months, this might be one of the world’s most extreme working environments – proving if you can compost here, you can do it anywhere.”

The equipment was shipped in late June and is now being installed at the Kazakhstan oilfield site.

Macclesfield-headquartered Tidy Planet has expanded its operations into Italy, appointing environmental solutions firm Ecologia Soluzione Ambiente (ESA), as the exclusive Italian partner of its food waste composting technology.

The move aims to promote greater resource efficiency – through using food waste recycling solutions – across the Italian and Egyptian markets.

Tidy Planet’s quoted composting expert, Huw Crampton.ESA – the 17 million-turnover company – has over 50 years’ experience within the environmental sector and several specialist divisions, including wastewater treatment, landfill remediation, waste collection systems and plants which demilitarise arms and explosives.

An increasing appetite in Italy for composting and decentralised food waste infrastructure is the main driver behind the partnership – which will see ESA receive a range of Tidy Planet’s Rocket Composters in 2021.

Commenting on the food waste landscape in Italy, Tidy Planet’s composting expert, Huw Crampton, said: “Italy, like many other European Union (EU) Member States, is under pressure from its government and policymakers to minimise its carbon emissions, and demonstrate the country is working towards the United Nation’s 17 sustainable development goals.

“Environmental awareness is growing in Italy, and composting is becoming an increasingly favoured solution. This is also coupled with a new update in Italian law, which allows small-scale, municipal composting to be implemented more easily – making it a higher, and more favourable, priority on the waste management agenda, especially for the public sector.”

Numerous pilot projects will be taking place in Italy, this year.

Elaborating on the current landscape in Italy, ESA’s president, Enrico Benedetti, said: “There’s an upward composting trend in our country at the moment – with a handful of municipalities having already released tenders to supply in-vessel composters to remote communities.

“At the heart of this partnership is the desire to equip our nation’s villages with improved waste equipment and a more sustainable infrastructure for the future.

“If we’re able to process our food wastes at source, this will not only reduce disposal costs, but it will also drastically decrease our carbon footprint – with less collection vehicles on the roads – and allow for a landfill diversion strategy that truly improves the recycling and segregation of food waste.”

The country’s Biorepak scheme – which centres around extended producer responsibility for compostable packaging – also came into force in 2020, to help reach the Waste Framework Directive’s target of recycling 65% of municipal waste by 2035.

“We visited some of their decentralised composting sites in the UK prior to the pandemic and were really impressed with the systems and the results, hence the decision to represent them in our homeland.

“We’re excited to launch the university project this year and look forward to working closer with the firm, to help our country meet its recycling targets in 2021 and beyond.”

Tidy Planet is an organic waste and Energy-from-Waste solutions expert based in Macclesfield, Cheshire. With over 20 years’ experience within the waste and recycling arena, the firm has worked with many small and blue-chip organisations, helping them to close the loop and reduce their carbon footprint. Clients include, City of Glasgow College, Raymond Blanc’s Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons and Gatwick Airport, to name a few.

Waste Directive recycling targets source article: https://www.interregeurope.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/plp_uploads/policy_briefs/Policy_brief_on_waste_management.pdf

Tidy Planet has expanded into Scandinavia, appointing Norwegian waste management firm Berekraft for Alle as the company’s latest distribution partner.

Translated into English as ‘sustainability for all,’ Berekraft for Alle is a start-up company on Norway’s west coast, which specialises in the procurement of equipment for water purification, waste vacuum transport and composting. The move represents Tidy Planet’s first commercial collaboration in this area of Northern Europe.

As a result, Tidy Planet’s globally acclaimed Rocket Composters – designed to process food, green and animal wastes, as well as sewage sludges – have been added to Berekraft’s portfolio, to help manage the country’s organic wastes more sustainably.

Commenting on the partnership, Berekraft for Alle’s CEO, Rune Brandal, said: “In Norway, we still have a problem with councils using our fjords and oceans as places to dispose of sewage sludge, which is damaging the health of our marine ecosystems – something we’re passionate about combating.

Tidy Planet Rocket Composter equipment

“This partnership with Tidy Planet is a great opportunity to introduce equipment which has the power to change the way this waste stream is currently being dealt with.”

Also a distributor for leading global equipment supplier Aqseptence Group, Berekraft for Alle will combine the German firm’s water filtration technology – which generates clean water and compostable sludge – with Tidy Planet’s composting solutions.

Rune added: “Merging the waste management technologies will create a complete wastewater handling system that converts this troublesome waste stream into a valuable compost resource, which we can offer to all Norwegian municipalities.”

Commercial food waste management is another sector Rune sees Tidy Planet’s In-Vessel Composters helping optimise the industry.

He explained: “In Norway, we have a small population with large land mass, meaning sustainable management of organic wastes can be challenging, and expensive for businesses – especially those located in rural areas.

“Organic wastes are often transported over long distances – sometimes over the border into Sweden – and end up being incinerated or used in anaerobic digestion to create biogas.

“Many of Norway’s waste policies are created with the more densely populated areas in mind, so our challenge has always been finding solutions which are economical on a smaller scale.”

Tidy Planet’s director, James Tyler, believes Norway’s public awareness of ‘green,’ environmental issues is catalysing a growing appetite among councils and companies to seek out a more localised approach to managing their wastes.

“At the moment, most commercial organic waste in Norway is sent for incineration, and prior to the last few years, there hadn’t been much market appetite for composting.

“However, with increased mindfulness about the waste issues facing our planet, decentralised composting of industrial-scale organic wastes is gaining in popularity among businesses wanting to reduce their carbon footprint and save money on costly disposal fees.”

Rune continued: “Thanks to this partnership, we are able to offer scalable, efficient and cost-effective solutions which empower organisations to close the loop and create a useful compost resource to be used locally.”

James concluded: “We’re committed to growing our network of quality distributors in markets that are turning to sustainable food waste disposal, and it’s great to be facilitating this positive and ethical movement in Norway from over 1500 miles away.”

In July 2019, the Berekraft for Alle team will be visiting Tidy Planet’s headquarters in Macclesfield to receive equipment training and see an existing system – processing sewage screenings at a site in South East England – in action.