Recent reports indicate that decaying household waste could produce a gas, which if harnessed and fed into the National Grid system would provide up to 20% of Britain’s requirements, providing a way can be found to connect this gas into the national gas system.
Sterecycle, a company backed by Goldman Sachs and Fidelity International, believes it has the answer with an autoclave recycling plant which treats waste with steam under high pressure. This is similar to a process used in hospitals for sterilisation and can reduce unwanted materials to fibrous compost.
From this it is hoped that the gas biomethane can be captured and linked to the gas network. If successful, this process could make a significant contribution to the hole left by the reduction of North Sea reserves.
One of the major advantages claimed by Sterecycle is that the waste does not need a high degree of sorting. The company hopes to achieve sufficient investment to build the plant to carry out the process of producing the gas, which is in a way particularly interesting as most similar activities are directed towards the generation of electricity.

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