Bredbury, Stockport. 20th August, 2013
Premier Waste UK, Walsall Road, Perry Bar, Birmingham, 4 Aug 2013
Shireoaks Road, Worksop. 3rd August, 2013
HW Martin Waste in Parkside Lane, Beeston, 31 July, 2013
Park Road, Padiham, 26th July, 2013.
Lockerbie Road, Dumfries 18th July, 2013
Foley Street, Attercliffe, Sheffield, 14th July, 2013
Jayplas, Smethwick, Birmingham, 1st July, 2013
Lawrence Recycling, Stourport Road, Kidderminster (Again). 16th June, 2013
Albert Hill Industrial Estate, Darlington 25th May. 2013
Sandy Lane Industrial Estate, Stourport-on-Severn. 20th May, 2013
Sims Metal Management, Long Marston, Stratford-Upon-Avon. 30th April, 2013
Lawrence Recycling, Stourport Road, Kidderminster. 12th December 2012
North West Recycling, Kingmoor Park industrial estate, Carlisle. 3rd December, 2012
BW Riddle, South Fen Road, Bourne (Again). 2nd December, 2012
Caythorpe, Lincolnshire, (Again). 2nd November, 2012
Johnson's Lane, Widnes. 21st October, 2012
Caythorpe, Lincolnshire. 18th October, 2012
Stanton-by-Dale, Long Eaton, Derbyshire. 15th September, 2012
BW Riddle, South Fen Road, Bourne. 14th September, 2012
Dagenham, East London. 12th August, 2012
North West Electronics Recycling, Carneige Road, Liverpool. 5th July, 2012
Scrubs Lane, Willesden, London. 25th May, 2012
Heydon, Cambridgeshire. 21st March, 2012
Jigsaw Recycling Yard, Port Clarence, Billingham. 11th March, 2012
Nechells, Birmingham. 3rd March, 2012
Homefield Road, Haverhill, Suffolk. 27th February, 2012
Chilton, Didcot, Oxfordshire. 22nd February, 2012
Wyllie Waste Recycling Services, Perth. 17th February, 2012
Bolton Brothers paper, Claydon, Suffolk. 2nd February, 2012
Try it yourself, start typing "recycling plant fire" into Google - look how many other searches there have been for similar incidents. The question I now have is when are the authorities going to start looking more closely at "recycling plant fires". Is it poor practices, lack of regulation. Are all these fires just coincidence or are they a mechanism for the owners to get rich quick, and leave society with the environmental chaos?
Fire Service Resource / Cost
Recycling plant fires aren’t little fires which need one or two fire engines and a dozen fireman to put out, no these fires require immense resources from our already over stretched fire services.
During the Smethwick recycling fire last month, West Midlands Fire Service was stretched to breaking point in what has been branded the biggest blaze in the region's history. At one point during the fire JUST ONE fire engine was left free to deal with the whole of the remainder of the West Midlands. Over 40 fire engines and 200 fire-fighters were needed to bring the fire under control.
Most of these large fire’s have occurred in areas with fairly big fire & rescue services who could cover the attendance required, but what happens when they can’t, or if they’re in a more rural area with less availability of resource and another ‘life’ threatening emergency comes in, what gives ? Are people’s lives being put at risk, not just the fire-fighters fighting the recycling fire, but the general public who require their services to genuinely save their life?
Better Health & Safety
In many cases the way the waste is stored at these centres contributes to the size of the blaze. If they were to store the various types of waste in a yard with non-flammable (brick, concrete or even corrugated steel) firewalls dividing it up into bays or sections the fires would be easily contained and not spread to the whole yard.
If it’s not already, surely it would be more sense to make it illegal to store so much flammable (and toxic) material side-by side all in one place without any firewalls. In buildings the regulations require fire compartments for separation, why not in recycling centres?
Why are bails of flammable materials not covered adequately to prevent their ignition? Why are there not adequate fire prevention mechanisms in place such as sprinklers or alarms? How is it possible than entire centres can go up in flames time and time again? No matter how the fires start, the results always seem to be the same.
It is alleged in various articles that the companies that operate these sites try to work on a shoestring, paying out minimum wage to their employees who obviously aren't going to be too interested in SHE (safety, health, environment); they therefore, keep their running costs down by saving budget money on H & S etc. They should all be held accountable. Or are Health and Safety officials turning a blind-eye so we can meet EU dictates on recycling targets?
Fifteen or so years ago, your local council used to dispose of waste. They sent it for landfill or controlled incineration. But then along came Global Warming. It was decided by the greens and the environmental lobby that the tried-and-tested methods that had worked for years were bad. Never slow to jump on a bandwagon, our politicians delivered innumerable patronising sermons, preaching that in order to reduce the release of harmful gases into the atmosphere, rubbish must be recycled - and so it began.
Unfortunately the society we live in today with it’s over use of packaging etc, produces rubbish at a far greater rate than the recycling plants can manage. Yet, in the usual political, vote chasing, idiot kneejerk response to a perceived global warming problem, that consideration was not deemed important. So waste gets piled up. And up. And up.
Recycling is a good idea in theory; however the practicalities of it are immensely difficult. I refuse to believe there is much demand for all this recycled plastic and paper. Glass and metal, yes I’ll go along with that but plastic, no, sorry. When did you last buy something that had been made out of recycled plastic? There isn’t much, trust me. If you Google recycling you’ll see the very limited number of things made out of recycled plastic. Its not stuff the average person would use anyway so it starts to become a total waste of time, maybe we should go back to burying the whole lot.
Greens will argue the environmental issues mean we must recycle. We’ve had lots of these enormous fires recently and the environmental damage and pollution they cause must be horrendous. Oh and don’t forget to take into account the energy expended initially collecting, sorting and transporting the waste, so not exactly carbon neutral is it?
Looking at the images, and seeing the smoke plume myself, I just wonder how much environmental damage was caused by this week’s Bredbury recycling plant going up in smoke, and that’s real, actual, measurable environmental damage. The news reported inhabitants east of the cloud could see, touch and taste the ash, smoke and whatever else it contained, many having to clean it off their cars and property.
It would be refreshing if those responsible for commissioning these places would pause to consider the irony of what they’ve done. By jumping on the little understood bandwagon of global warming they have managed to achieve exactly what they set out to prevent. But there again, who needs to think when there is preaching to be done?
Incinerator proposals are constantly being rejected by council planning authorities as environmentalist plant it in the head of the locals that they’re unsafe - and these recycling centres are? Thirty going up in flames in eighteen months floors that argument. If there was no danger to anyone from 10,000 tons of plastic rubbish burning away then incinerators just have to be safer. Why not use them to burn our rubbish? A much better idea to have a controlled blaze than to have thousands of tons of rubbish piling up to be recycled and catching alight.
Of course, we’re assuming that all these fires are coincidental, but are they? Cast your mind back in history to the Sixties and Seventies, throughout the North the arse had felt out of the textiles industry as it moved abroad. Mill owners were set to lose everything, so what did they do? An insurance job of course, they burned the mill down.
Back to the present. You get paid to collect all this rubbish under the green ‘recycling’ banner, now what do you do with it? You’re supposed to sell it on to companies and countries that can re-use the waste but that’s not easy.
With the number of fires at recycling plants in recent months. I wonder if the bottom has dropped out of the market for our crap plastic, maybe India and China no longer want it?
So what’s the quickest and cheapest way for a recycling plant owner of disposing of this unwanted waste? An accidental file would be very useful, nice insurance payout. You take the money and walk away - Rich.
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