Thursday 28th May 2009
Promoting a green ethos at Chelsea Flower Show
Over 95% of the waste generated at Chelsea Flower Show last week has been recycled, exceeding the Royal Horticultural Society’s target of 90% for this year’s show. More than 600 tonnes of waste including wood, soil and food waste from the show have been recovered at Powerday’s materials recycling facility in North West London.
Lorry loads of material, otherwise destined for landfill sites, were transported a few miles down the road to be segregated and sent on to be reused within the UK.
Show manager Alex Baulkwill, from the Royal Horticultural Society, emphasised the importance of promoting environmental best practice.
“We were looking to make all our operations as green as possible,” said Alex, who visited the nine acre site to observe what happened to waste when it arrived.
We have sometimes come in for a hard time but as a leading gardening charity we wanted to be responsible and sustainable when it comes to managing waste.
Last year we recycled more than 80 per cent of our waste but we wanted to go that step further and that’s why we chose Powerday – this year they have recycled more than 95 per cent of our material and from what I’ve seen there are some really great things going on.”
This year, RHS worked with Sagum, which specialises in cleaning and waste services for the events industry. Director Ken Sidebottom said Powerday’s target of 100 per cent resource recovery by the end of this year was the main reason he chose to work with the facility.
“The fact that they are operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week was also a real selling point because of the way the show works.
And the site is only a few miles down the road from the show so we could keep vehicle movement to a minimum.”
Mick Crossan, director at Powerday, said he is thrilled to see so much material diverted from landfill and put to good use.
“With the recent rise in landfill tax it makes economic sense for organisations like the Royal Horticultural Society to seek alternative disposal methods,” he said. “And of course they avoid contributing to the gases that are said to add to climate change.”
Nearly all materials that came through Powerday, a family-owned business located in Willesden Junction that has the capacity to recover nearly 10 per cent of London’s waste, were sent on to be reprocessed in the UK.
Clean wood was shredded and sent to Slough Heating and Power, soil was sent by rail to Calvert in Oxford for land restoration projects and concrete was crushed and reused on building sites.
