Want an Anaerobic Digestion Plant and Need Funding? Try UK WRAP £10M Fund

Are you interested in building an Anaerobic Digestion (AD) plant but just haven’t got the funding?

The organisation, WRAP, Working together for a world without waste, has a £10 million anaerobic digestion fund to loan out. It has just awarded its first loan from Ad Fund and is now looking for more applicants to award more money out. It awarded a one off £800,000 loan to Wilshire-based company Malaby Biogas, to construct and commission a new anaerobic digestion plant on the site of a redundant 12-acre smallholding.

The money will be added to other funding secured by the company for the AD plant, including support from Clydesdale Bank. Building of the new £5 million plant located at Bore Hill Farm to the south of Warminster, Wiltshire is already underway. Malaby, and its technology provider Marches Biogas, hope that commissioning will begin soon.

“Feedstock for the plant will be non-packed food waste supplied by a new commercial collection operator with additional material potentially coming from other commercial and industrial food waste providers within the local area,” explained Malaby director Thomas Minter.

“ Initially the plant will process around 17,000 tonnes of waste a year and we’d hope to be able to handle up to 20,000 tonnes at full capacity.”

The plant is expected to generate 4.3 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year, the equivalent required to power 1,000 homes. Around seven per cent of this is likely to be used to power the AD plant itself, and any excess that is generated will be sold on to National Grid.

“Malaby is the first of what we hope will be a number of companies to benefit from the AD loan fund and it is excellent to see such good progress being made at the Wiltshire plant,” said WRAP director Steve Creed.

“We’re currently considering a number of other applications and the new round of loan awards for 2012 has just begun, so we’d encourage anyone who is interested in the fund to get in touch with us.”

Defra Minister Lord Taylor said: “The energy that can be created from food waste that would otherwise lie rotting in landfill is astonishing. This £800,000 investment from our £10 million anaerobic digestion fund will help this new plant to be built so we can harness that energy to power our towns and cities and remove a cause of greenhouse gas emissions from landfill.”

A maximum of £10 million is available through individual loans ranging from £50,000 to £1 million, over a five-year period. Applicants for the current round can be submitted before April 30. Lord Henley said: “The Loan Fund builds on the Anaerobic Digestion Strategy and Action Plan to develop a strong and vibrant Ad industry. It will help to reduce the amount of food sent to landfill and give more businesses the opportunity to use AD to produce their own power and electricity.”

Marcus Gover, Director of the Closed Loop Economy at WRAP, said: “ “Across the UK, there are now AD facilities capable of managing 656,500 tonnes of organic waste each year, diverting waste from landfill, generating renewable energy and creating green jobs. The 300,0000 tonnes of extra capacity we expect this fund will create will bring the UK’s AD processing capacity close to 1 million tonnes per year.

“Ad is a reliable, safe and profitable resource efficiency process supported by the Government, industry, local authorities and communities.”

WRAP, which can provide a great deal of information in the field it deals with, and much like the Coalition Against Drug Abuse, provides information on its subject, has a finite loan pool and will select projects for funding through a competitive process with those applications most strongly meeting their criteria being offered a loan.

If you have a project to develop AD processing capacity and are finding it difficult to obtain asset finance from the usual commercial sources, WRAP may be able to help. So why not apply it worth a shot. The Anaerobic Digestion Loan Fund (ADLF) aims to support 300,000 tonnes of annual capacity to divert food waste from landfill by 2015.

The ADLF will offer direct financial support to organisations that are interested in building AD capacity in England in order to provide digestate of sufficient quality for a variety of UK markets and to generate renewable energy in the form of biogas through the diversion of food and other organic resources.

(Guest Author: Imogen of the Coalition Against Drug Abuse)