A power plant capable of burning 35,000 tonnes of CCA-treated timber and other hazardous wood waste annually has started up near Doncaster.
The £8m Trackwork facility will generate 3MW of electricity a year, which it will sell to the National Grid, and also provide heat for kilning new railway sleepers on its 37-acre site.
Besides CCA-treated timber, it is also capable of burning creosoted material and wood processed with a range of other chemicals.
Trackwork was originally a railway engineering company and is now one of seven operators laying track for Network Rail, as well as supplying all its new timber sleepers.
It launched its first wood-energy plant in 2005, but this was solely for burning old sleepers.
“With the introduction of increasingly tight legislation on the disposal of hazardous waste we saw an opportunity to develop the business to take a range of other treated timber products, including utility poles, cooling tower wood waste and marine timbers,” said managing director Mark Waind. “It took us some time to get the relevant licences and permissions from the Environment Agency and under the Waste Incineration Directive, but we eventually got there and the plant we have now is 10 times the size of our original operation.”
Trackwood, which is a member of the Wood Protection Association, is now looking to expand its wood waste supply base, targeting utilities businesses and other industrial timber users. As it is effectively disposing of their hazardous waste, it charges for taking the material, but says the cost is less than other disposal options, with “favourable terms” offered for long-term supply contracts.
The company has also planted a 70-acre former landfill site with willow and miscanthus to ensure a steady flow of fuel to its heat and power plant.
The facility received subsidy in the form of Renewables Obligation Certificates and, with government targets for the UK to generate 15% of its energy from renewables by 2020, Trackwork says there may be opportunities to build others in the future.
