A trio of merchant banks and investment funds have bought equity holdings in the new £110 million energy from waste factory being built in the Central Belt by Levenseat Renewable Energy Ltd.
Neither the scale, nor the value, of the holdings acquired by Zouk Capital or Foresight Group have been disclosed, while the Edinburgh-based Green Investment Bank said the moves takes its total indirect investment to £28.5 million.
The 12.5 MWe energy from waste (EfW) plant and adjacent materials recycling facility which is being built at Forth, near Lanark, is the first project of this type in the UK to combine fluidised bed gasification technology and refuse-derived fuel.
The plant will recover plastics, metals, paper and card for recycling collected by local authorities in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh and delivered in truckloads off the M8.
The project is forecast to recycle over a million tonnes of materials over its lifetime and will generate the heat required by the recycling facility.
The development is also forecast to supply electricity equivalent to the needs of nearly 18,000 homes over its expected 25-year lifespan. It is also expected to save 1.4 million tonnes of waste from going into landfill and deliver a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of around 1.3 million tonnes, equivalent to taking over 23,000 cars off the road for every year it operates.
The electricity will be supplied to the national grid with the heat output assisting the operation of the recycling facility. It will create more than 100 jobs during the construction phase and support 50 full-time jobs when complete.
The plant is expected to become operational in January 2017, with the complete plant commencing operations in June of that year. Given its location near the centre of the M8 corridor, the facility will be well placed to process household waste from several local authorities and commercial waste from the Glasgow and Edinburgh regions.
M+W Group – the German-based multinational – has been appointed main (EPC) contractor for the project.
Peter MacLaren, Director, Levenseat, said: “We are delighted to be delivering a first-of-kind technology to the UK market. This is further evidence of our commitment to developing new environmental and economic solutions for waste management and with the construction of our new plant together with our wider established facility we will be delivering to the market Scotland’s largest integrated facility providing treatment and recovery for a wide range of waste materials.”
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