Sustainability at Brown Recycling
Building a sustainable business and supporting our customers on their sustainability journey have been key strategies for Brown Recycling for over 20 years.
We have invested in our processing plants, our processes and our equipment with the aim of reducing our environmental impact, expanding our energy recovery from waste, diverting the maximum possible amount of waste we process from landfill and developing partnerships that support our drive to recycle and reuse waste into new production streams.
Through continual investment in our infrastructure and our business-wide focus on recycle, recover and reuse, we provide our customers with sustainable waste management and are building an ever- growing and effective circular economy across all our waste streams.
Through our zero waste to landfill target we help customers improve their sustainability performance and credentials, as well as positively impacting the communities in which they operate. We are proud to be a business with a strong sustainability and environmental focus. Despite the positive progress we have made, we continue to set ourselves challenging goals for the future to benefit our people, our customers, our communities and our business too.
Our central waste management facility at Vanguard House, built in 2011, was at the forefront of eco development. We have on-site rainwater harvesting tanks that feed our vehicle wash and toilets and bricks recycled from our processing were used for structural gabion basket walls. Our office building has argon filled glazing to reduce heat loss and is clad in sustainability sourced timber to further enhance insulation. And all our buildings and processing plants are fitted with LED lighting.
Vanguard House was also home to the first purpose built SRF (Solid Recovered Fuel) facility in Europe, a major development for the waste management industry in the UK.
Our waste collection and transport fleet renewal programme is aligned with the latest low emission engine technology.
In 2023 we updated our fleet with £1.1 million of new vehicles. 95% of our fleet of 45 vehicles are already Euro 6 standard compliant for emissions with the target of achieving 100%. In support of this target, a further £1.3 million has been invested in new Euro 6 vehicles which are due for delivery in April 2024 .
We are also actively investigating the viability of adding all electric vehicles into our fleet for trade waste collections.
100% of our mobile plant machinery is Tier 4+ emissions standard. And in 2023 we invested in a Solmec battery powered mobile 360 waste handling machine, only the 2 nd in the UK, to replace a diesel powered equivalent. A second machine was purchased in July 2023.
Our latest waste shredder processes an extra 30% of waste throughput for the same energy output of the previous machine. In context this equates to an extra 3000+ tonnes of waste converted into RDF (Refuse Derived Fuel) per annum for no added electricity use and 1800 megawatt hours of electrical energy generated at the EfW (Energy from Waste) facility we supply.
Our Sustainability Performance
From August 2011 to end of 2023:
- 315,000+ tonnes of waste were diverted from landfill and converted into SRF / RDF, which has been used to generate heat and electrical power in the UK.
- More than 200,000 tonnes of waste have been recycled and re-used.
- Over 516,000 tonnes of waste, generated primarily in Staffordshire and South Cheshire has been treated by Brown Recycling, saved from being sent to landfill, recycled wherever possible or used as EfW feedstock – all contributing to the circular economy in the region.
We are consistently delivering our zero waste to landfill target, a testament to the hard work of the whole Brown Recycling team.
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