Environment Awards: Innovation Award Winner: GWE Biogas

Rural farms in the East Riding of Yorkshire are perhaps not the first place you would start looking if you’re interested in the cutting-edge science of green energy generation.

But then Driffield farmers Tom Megginson and Mathew Girking are well used to breaking new ground.

The pair have combined forces to create what is currently perhaps the region’s most innovative environmental facility – a massive anaerobic digestion plant which diverts food waste from landfill and creates sources of sustainable electricity, heat and fertiliser.

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Their firm, GWE Biogas, wins this year’s Innovation Award, sponsored by Science City York.

“The project idea was originally conceived as agricultural diversification,” Mr Megginson said.

“But we quickly realised that the UK had a massive organic waste problem. So we changed our plans significantly and developed what is in fact a very large recycling facility.”

Since the £10m plant opened last autumn, businesses have been able to cost-effectively divert their food waste from landfill by sending it to GWE. The firm employs some of the most advanced de-packaging equipment in the world so that food can be recycled even if it is still inside its packaging.

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When fully operational, the plant will be able to consume up to 50,000 tonnes of waste a year from catering businesses and food manufacturers – all of which would previously have been left rotting in landfill.

The anaerobic digestion process which GWE employs involves using billions of microbes to break down the food and organic waste into usable fuels.

Left over at the end of the process are two highly useful and environmentally-friendly by-products: bio-gas, which will be burned to make green electricity, and bio-fertiliser, which will be used on farms right across Yorkshire and beyond.

“All the technology is totally proven,” Mr Megginson said. “But it has not been used much here in the UK before. It was a huge gap which needed to be filled.”

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So innovative is the GWE project on these shores that it has been named a national demonstration plant for the UK, designed to prove the viability of the technology and develop best practice for others to follow.

This status allowed GWE to leverage both public sector grants and private sector investment into the large new business.

The profitability of the scheme certainly looks assured.

“We have a double source of income,” Mr Megginson said. “Our main income stream comes from the fees we charge firms for the waste disposal – they would otherwise have to pay landfill fees so we are offering them a significant saving. We then have further income streams from the sale and use of the electricity and the bio-fertiliser.”

Proof, if any were still needed, that being green really does pay in the modern world.