Southwest Environmental Limited

Turnkey Waste Transfer Site

With ever increasing legislative requirements for waste transfer sites, it is important that site set-up in considered from the out set. The ability of a site to be suitable for a waste transfer operation depends on many things.

Strategic Placement

The placement of a waste site is very tricky. It must be close to the source of refuse, but also not near a population center. This is a conflict from the outset! It is not impossible to start a waste transfer site near or even within a populated area, but it will be more difficult.

As we move away from towns and cities, transport links become more irregular. There are some excellent spots for waste transfer sites but without good access, and wide roads they will fail at planning.

The solution is often to choose a site in an industrial area, perhaps with B2 planning use already granted and this will speed up your set-up. Of course a site like this may not be available, and rental or purchase will be expensive limiting investment growth.

A "ready made" site may also not have room for all of the features you may require:

Built Elements

Built elements such as water tanks, bunding, materials bays, turning areas etc. These all take up space, and a site will need to be big enough to house all of the required equipment, and stock piled materials.

A particularly troublesome point is fire prevention which requires some very unorthodox layouts, and masses of water storage and bunding. Access for fire fighting has to be considered also.

If these elements are not considered at purchase and at planning, then they may force on you when applying for an environmental permit, when it is too late to change the size of the site, or having to amend planning permission.

Structural Design

Waste transfer sites are a harsh environment. They will experience highly volume of HGV traffic, and deal with large volumes of irregular often loose material.

Design of trafficable surfaces and building has to be robust, and considered in the early stages of the site development.

There is often requirements for bespoke design requirements. We use state of the art 2D modeling to ensure buildings are workable, and that consideration such as beam thicknesses are accounted for when considering building heights and widths.

For example portal buildings for sorting of waste often have very large spans for beams to span, if the depth of the beams is not considered as part of the building height then you can be left short. These beams cab ebe 50cm in depth, and that can mean the difference between:

a) being able to tip a lorry of not tip a lorry

b) being in breach of planning if you are relying on a fixed internal dimension which has not accounted for beam depth. 

Image: Peter Craven [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons