Hounslow Council, Lampton 360

Hounslow Council

What they asked us: How can we start making profit from our waste to provide an extra revenue stream to the council?

Hounslow Council approached Whitham Mills wanting to start making profit from their materials collection to be filtered back into the council rather than allowing third party waste management companies to benefit from this revenue stream.  Hounslow set up a subdivision of the council, Recycle 360, to handle all materials processing and homogenise the district’s kerbside collections which now consist of plastics and cans together and paper in another container.

The State-of-the-art site required a collaborative approach with Whitham Mills and Willmott Dixon, one of the largest building and construction companies in the UK, to deliver a successful turnkey project.

Recycle 360, collects all of Hounslow’s household and residual waste which is now being processed at their new Southall Lane Depot. Whitham Mills designed, manufactured and installed a dual baling system with a GB1108F (fully automatic cardboard baler) and a GB1175TR (twin ram baler) so they can bale two different types of materials at one time. The fully automatic channel baler (GB1108F) came supplied with an extra-large hopper for direct loading by shovel or bobcat, whilst the twin ram baler is automatically fed by a stream of either, plastics, aluminium or steel cans via a complex conveyor and sorting system.

The new sorting system begins at an infeed conveyor delivering materials onto a picking line for operators to manually pick out contaminate material. Then the material moves underneath an Overband magnet which separates the steel cans onto a conveyor and into a bunker. After which the rest of the material moves on to a vibrating table to evenly distribute the material before passing over an Eddy current, separating out the aluminium from the plastics. The twin ram baler (GB1175TR) is then either directly fed the sorted plastics or fed steel or aluminium via shovel; in which case the plastics conveyor can be reversed to fill up a bunker with the sorted material. The GB1175TR is capable of producing bale weights in excess of 550kg at a size of 5200 x 2845 x 9400mm when fed with plastic. The fully automatic cardboard baler (GB1108FL) is simultaneously fed cardboard and paper directly, producing bale weights of over 500kg at a size of 9600 x 4305 2660mm.

By having this dual baling system Hounslow Council can adequately produce over 32,000 bales per annum with the ability to increase production dependent on material requirements due to holding a license capacity well in excess of the volumes it is handling at present.

Commissioned in December 2017, Hounslow’s award winning facility produces top quality bales of sorted materials that can be sold at the best market rates to reprocessors which have added an additional revenue stream to the council.

Leader of Hounslow Council, Councillor Steve Curran said:

“The council is justifiably proud of this state-of-the-art facility which enables us to efficiently sort our recycling materials and divert more and more waste from landfill.  At a time that the world is waking up to the environmental hazards of plastics in particular, recycling is more important than ever.  In addition, the revenue generated from sales of our processed waste goes back into protecting the council’s frontline services.”