Surrey County Council (SCC) announced in December that there are no longer plans to build Energy from Waste incinerators in Surrey. Instead they are planning an Eco Park in Shepperton that will have an anaerobic digester (AD) to handle all Surrey’s domestic food waste. SCC is already working with the District and Borough Councils on separate food collections which should be operating throughout the county by the time the digester is ready.

This is good news of course, but is it the best option? The Green Mole Forum has set up a group to study this and we have met the SCC manager responsible for developing these plans. We learnt that SCC has only studied a single site to handle all of Surrey’s domestic food waste, but agreed there are viable alternatives that they have not studied properly. Importantly they haven’t considered having a number of local AD plants instead of one big plant, nor have they considered commercial food waste or farm waste as a possible feedstock for the plants. Smaller plants have a number of advantages including:

We have recently taken a big step forward by commissioning a student at Surrey University's Centre for Environment Strategy (CES) to carry out a thorough study of large versus local AD plants. Using Life Cycle Analysis, a study technique for which CES has an international reputation, it'll work out the best environmental option and will be her MSc project.

An important early part of the work will be collecting data from Mole Valley’s cafes, pubs, sandwich shops, school canteens, etc. to estimate how much commercial food waste is produced. SCC estimate that it could be about the same quantity as the total domestic food waste.