Eco-Council's Grundon Trip

​This week our fantastic Eco Council visited the Grundon Lakeside Energy from Waste Recycling Centre at Colnbrook.  They were given a guided tour of the facility and the process of turn your general household waste into electricity and how the waste products were also recycled was clearly explained.  The facility is capable of recovering energy from over 410,000 tonnes of residual (non-recyclable) waste per year from local authorities and businesses, and diverting 100% of waste from landfill. The Lakeside Energy from Waste facility generates 37 MW of electricity, a small amount of which is used to power the plant itself, with the vast majority being exported to the National Grid.  Lakeside produces enough electricity to power a town the size of Slough!  Even the Incinerator Bottom Ash (IBA) can be recovered and recycled for used as a substitute for natural aggregate which is used as a sub-base for roads.

In addition to this, they learnt the importance of recycling correctly and took part in some sorting games, made a pledge and had the chance to operate some of the tasks involved in producing the electricity on a computer model.  Following their work on Clean Air, our Eco Warriors were extremely interested in finding out how clean the water vapour output was and how the emissions were strictly monitored.