Nappy Composting Plant to Treat Hygiene Waste in Rochester

North Canterbury, New Zealand based nappy recycling specialist, Envirocomp is to open its first UK plant in Rochester in Autumn this year. The company - which is owned by UK based international facilities services provider, OCS Group – claimed to be the first in the world to successfully compost waste from absorbent hygiene products (AHP). Based at an existing waste treatment facility, Envirocomp explained that once its new facility is opened, commercial customers in South East England will have the option of composting all types of waste from absorbent hygiene products (AHP waste), such as nappy, feminine hygiene and adult incontinence. The company claimed that a whopping 2.7 billion disposable nappies are purchased in the UK every year and that together with other absorbent hygiene products the account for more than 600,000 tonnes of waste each year. The Rochester plant is expected to be capable of composting around 6.5 million nappies and other products per year. The waste processed by the new composting plant will be collected from commercial customers of Cannon Hygiene - also a subsidiary of OCS Group - in the Region, helping to reduce their carbon footprint and minimising waste transport time. Cannon Hygiene provides washroom services to a number of companies in the area and across the UK. The process used by the nappy busting specialist was developed by husband and wife team, Karl and Karen Upston in collaboration with fellow New Zealand company, HotRot Organic Solutions using its patented in-vessel composting technology specialised in difficult to treat organic waste. Envirocomp added that it already operates similar plants in Canterbury and Wellington, New Zealand, since 2009. Read More Nappy Recycling is the UK ready to run, walk or crawl The UK throws away over one million tonnes of nappies each year. Recycling efforts by Knowaste are helping to generate plastic and fibre products from this stream. Will the business model be successful and take lessons from the Netherlands, where a facility had to close? VIDEO: Nappy Recycling Interview Tom Freyberg talks to Knowasgte CEO, Roy Brown, about the sticky issue of nappy waste. On-Site Gasification of Offensive Waste With the cost of collecting and treating offensive/hygiene waste continuing to rise for nursing and care homes PyroPure has developed a small scale system that uses both pyrolysis and gasification to recover energy from biowastes. Residues from the freezer sized machine are flushed into the sewage system. WMW takes a look at the technology.