Food waste recycling

Millions of tonnes of waste food from households, supermarkets, and restaurants s thrown away in the UK every year, a large proportion of which ends up going to landfill or travelling miles to treatment facilities.

Rather than letting this food waste get buried in the ground, where it creates the harmful greenhouse gas methane, Severn Trent’s subsidiary Severn Trent Green Power is capturing it and using it to generate renewable biogas and create a natural, effective bio-fertiliser that together help reduce carbon emissions, increase green energy and enrich farmers’ fields

State of the art food waste management

In January 2015 we opened the first of our network of dedicated food waste recycling anaerobic digestion centres at our Coleshill sewage works.

This state-of-the-art centre receives food waste from both local waste producers, local authorities and waste service providers and converts it into clean, renewable energy and biofertiliser. 

With the ability to recycle over 48,500 tonnes of packaged, loose and liquid food waste every year, the centre produces an impressive 2.4MWh of electricity per hour.

That’s enough to power both the centre and the adjoining sewage works, with the excess renewable electricity sold back to the National Grid. In total, 18,000MWh of green energy is produced annually, which is enough to power 4,500 homes. 

Meanwhile, the high quality biofertiliser produced during the digestion process is used on local farmland.

Turning waste into green power

Food waste is delivered to our anaerobic digestion centre where it's weighed on arrival, unloaded, unpackaged, screened, fed to the digesters and pasteurised.

It’s then transformed into green electricity and a nutrient-rich biofertiliser.

Operating anaerobic digestion centres isn’t anything new to Severn Trent.

We’ve been using them for decades, using a proven process where bacteria breaks down the organic food waste material in an oxygen-free atmosphere to produce biogas.

Once the process has begun the food waste spends up to three months in digestion.

This maximises the generation of biogas and ensures that the plant consistently produces a nutrient-rich biofertilizer that’s returned to land in place of more harmful fossil fuel derived fertilisers.

Where the food waste comes from

Our food waste centres provide a compliant, cost-effective and sustainable alternative to sending food waste to landfill or treatment plants outside of our region. This is particularly useful for food and beverage processors, local authorities, hospitals, schools, universities, the hospitality and catering sector, food retailers and waste management companies.

We also have an Environment Agency permit to receive and recycle a wide range of solid and liquid food waste materials, including category 3 animal by-product wastes. We’re able to recycle:

See the difference we’re making first-hand

Our Coleshill food waste recycling centre was the first of many anaerobic digestion plants we opened, both across our region and in others. Our second food waste recycling centre was located at Roundhill, Stourbridge and became operational in 2017. Further sites now exist in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Mid Glamorgan, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey, Devon and Gloucestershire.

You can see all the locations where we process food waste here.

Want to know more about our food waste centres?

Call us on 01675 466 220 or send us an email.

On-site services

Severn Trent Services is part of the Severn Trent Group and provides on site water management services for businesses which use high volumes of water.