Freight News, Sea

Updated: Tilbury and SITA sign waste terminal deal

[ July 16, 2014   //   Chris ]

Forth Ports has signed a long-term partnership with waste firm SITA to create a major recycling and resource management hub based at the Port of Tilbury on the River Thames. At the same time, SITA will buy, for an undisclosed sum, Forth Ports’ Nordic Recycling arm.

SITA UK will deliver a new alternative fuels waste material processing facility at Tilbury, which will process both solid recovered fuel (SRF) and refuse derived fuel (RDF), which will complement the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) currently operated at the Port of Tilbury.

Forth Ports said that siting the operation at Tilbury and its London Container Terminal would provide SITA UK with a unique opportunity to transport alternative fuels and secondary raw materials, domestically and internationally, by road, rail and sea.

Forth Ports CEO Perry Glading told FBJ in an interview: “This is a significant investment in processing by SITA. They will take over 280,000qq ft within the port in a 20year deal.”

SITA will bring in loose waste – – much of it from the immediate area, but also from London – process and sterilise, bale it, wrap it and then export it to the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where it will be used to generate electricity in specially adapted power stations of fuel area heating systems in Scandinavia. The UK itself lacks suitable generating capacity to use waste-derived fuel itself at the moment

He estimates that the deal will generate at least an extra 30,000 loaded 40ft boxes a year, as well as anything between 500,000 and 800,000 tonnes a year in conventional ships – welcome extra revenue in the UK, where imports have traditionally outweighed exports by a large margin. The baled waste is completely sterile so containers can be immediately reused after being emptied in Europe.

Mr Glading envisages that most of the containerised waste will be handled by existing liner services including Samskip and CWT to the Netherlands and DFDS and SCA to Scandinavia.

He described the scheme as an excellent example of port centric logistics in action – although in case, it is for an export flow. Most port centric activity has centred on exports.

Meanwhile, it has been nreported that Thurrock Council has approved a plan to builders merchants Travis Perkins to open a site at London Distribution Park. This would be the first unit to be let at the development just outside the Tilbury dock gate.

 

Pictured: Charles Hammond, group chief executive of Forth Ports and David Palmer-Jones, chief executive officer of SITA UK.

Tags: Forth Ports, SITA