A pioneering Rotherham company has unveiled plans to create 300 jobs and invest £200 million by building five new recycling plants around the country.
Sterecyle has developed waste recycling technology that sterilises household waste before recycling it, reducing the amount that has to be sent to landfill by 70 per cent.
Earlier this year, the company announced it was investing £10 million in doubling the size of its operations on the site of a former British Steel works in Rotherham, creating 20 jobs and enabling it to process 200,000 tonnes of waste a year – the amount of waste produced by a town of 400,000 people.
Now the firm says it has appointed UBS as financial adviser as part of a scheme to raise £50 million in new capital from institutional investors as part of its £200 million expansion.
The five new plants, around the UK, will increase the company's capacity to process unsorted household and commercial waste to approximately 1.5 million tonnes a year – equivalent to the annual waste produced by a city of three million people. Sterecycle has a seven-year contract to process waste for Rotherham, Doncaster and Barnsley councils.
Pressure inside the autoclaves is increased and steam is pumped in while the ovens are rotated.
Organic waste is broken down into a fibre which can be used for generating renewable energy, land restoration and even for making cardboard boxes.
Sterilised non-organic waste is easily separated from the fibre and can then be sent for recycling.
Sterecycle says the combination of steam and autoclaving has been used on a relatively small scale in the past for sterilising medical waste and its development for processing household waste is being driven by pressure to find green alternatives to burying waste in landfill sites.
New UK and European Union laws will impose penalties on councils and other organisations that fail to reduce their landfill.
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