New IBA Recycling Facility Comes Online at Johnson’s Lane

Ballast Phoenix has been recycling Incinerator Bottom Ash (IBA) since the late 1990’s and until recent times had seven operational sites in the UK. Mostly these are co-located with Municipal Solid Waste Incinerators and process between 75,000 to 150,000t/a of IBA at each facility.

However, its new IBA facility at Johnson’s Lane, Widnes is designed to process 250,000 t/a of IBA from the Runcorn Energy from Waste Incinerator. The Runcorn incinerator treats some 850,000t of Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF) each year, and apart from the IBA generates up to 70MW of electricity and over 50 MW of heat for use by INEOS ChlorVinyls; it is one of the largest energy recovery facilities operating in Europe.

IBA is the material left over after the RDF has been incinerated; it is a non-hazardous ash containing recyclable materials. IBA is a sustainable source of aggregate for reuse in many construction applications. It has been used on many high profile schemes, such as Olympic Development sites and M25 widening. The facility also recovers ferrous and non-ferrous metals.

Technically the processes used to manufacture these products combine traditional and well proven minerals processing and handling techniques; all of which Fairport is well versed in and have many years of experience with, coupled with some state of the art metal recovery techniques deployed by Ballast Phoenix. Notwithstanding this technical compatibility between the two organisations it would also be true to say that the success of the project was due to the Engineering, Procurement, Construction and Management contract arrangements that were put in place during the early design stages of the project in 2015. This enabled Fairport Engineering to work collaboratively and openly with Ballast Phoenix in order to eventually achieve on target and under budget outcomes for the project.

Some 25,000 construction hours have been used on the project since the process plant site works started in October last year. Governed by the C(DM) 2015 regulations and with Fairport acting as the Principal Contractor progress has been achieved in a timely and safe manner with the plant handed over in September.

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