The North London Waste Authority (NLWA) will mark the completion of its "Resource Recovery Facility" at the Edmonton EcoPark next week when it opens the site to the public. The new waste management hub houses a "recycling and fuel preparation facility", but also a "reuse and recycling centre" at which residents can drop off waste beginning on July 15.
Operational testing at the Resource Recovery Facility, which took £150m (ca. €178m) and four years to build, began late last year and has been ramping up since the spring. The recycling and fuel preparation facility receives and processes residual waste, but also bulky, food and garden wastes, waste textiles and mattresses. NLWA noted that the recycling facility would allow it to double its food waste processing capacity in preparation for the expected introduction of compulsory separate food waste collections across England by 2026.
Since it began accepting the first deliveries of waste from local authorities, some 22,000 tonnes of waste materials, including 3,000 mattresses, had been diverted from incineration, said site operator London Energy. In total, the NLWA expected that 135,000 tonnes of recyclable materials per year would be managed at the site. After the removal of recyclables, the residual material undergoes further processing to produce refuse derived fuel (RDF).
The waste processing and recycling units are elements of the larger £1.4bn North London Heat and Power Project, which also encompasses a new waste to energy plant, which is currently under construction. The energy recovery facility is to replace the aging Edmonton incinerator, which was initially commissioned in 1971. Work on the wte plant, which is being built by the Spanish infrastructure conglomerate Acciona, has been underway since 2022. After its completion, currently scheduled for 2027, the wte plant is to have a treatment capacity of up to 700,000 tonnes of waste per year and is to deliver heat via a new district heating network to up to 60,000 homes.
The NLWA serves the residents of the London boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Islington, Hackney, Haringey, and Waltham Forest and manages around a quarter of London's municipal waste arisings.
