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Riverside Resource Recovery Facility

Operation of the facility

All but 85,000 tonnes of the waste will be delivered in enclosed containers to the plant via the River Thames and offloaded at the new jetty. The waste will be loaded onto barges at Cory's existing river-served transfer stations at Walbrook Wharf in the City of London, Cringle Dock in Battersea and Smugglers Way in Wandsworth.

Container handing cranes will offload these containers, place them onto specialist container vehicles which will transport them to a fully enclosed waste reception hall in the main building. Road borne waste deliveries will access the waste reception hall directly by ramp.

Once inside all vehicles will discharge their loads into the waste storage bunker. Air from the reception hall and bunker area will be drawn into the waste combustion units creating a slight negative pressure which will prevent the escape of odours, dust or litter.

The waste combustion process will be carefully and continuously monitored to ensure, for example, that minimum combustion temperatures exceeed 850^oC. Heat energy will be recovered from the flue gases through specialist, high efficieny boilers. A turbine has the the capability to supply up to 30MW of steam/heat and up to 72MW of electricity. Approximately 6MW of this will be used in the plant with the remainder generating at 11Kv and transforming on site up to 132Kv for export to the grid.

Exhaust steam from the turbine will be condensed by a bank of air-cooled condensers.

The principal residue from the process will be bottom ash. Approximately 180,000 tonnes of bottom ash, including metals, will be produced each year. This will be collected in the ash bunker and loaded into covered containers which will be loaded onto barges and sent on the River Thames for metal recovery and for recycling into road building and construction aggregates.

All aspects of the plant's operation will be controlled and monitored to the strict standards of the EU Waste Incineration Directive.