Food Waste AD Facility Secures WRAP Loan

12 January 2011

The £10 million Anaerobic Digestion (AD) fund has made its first loan award of £800,000 to Wiltshire based Malaby Biogas to construct and commission a new AD facility on the site of a redundant 12 acre smallholding.

The fund was launched in July last year by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and is administered by the Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP).

According to WRAP, the one-off loan adds to other financing secured by Malaby Biogas, including equity investment and support from Clydesdale Bank.

Construction of the new £5 million facility, located at Bore Hill Farm to the south of Warminster, Wiltshire, is already under way and the developer, and its technology provider Marches Biogas, hope that commissioning will begin in March.

"Feedstock for the plant will be non-packaged 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 is expected to process around 17,000 tonnes of waste a year and the company said that it hopes be able to handle up to 20,000 tonnes at full capacity.

The plant is expected to generate 4300 MW/h of electricity a year - enough to power 1000 homes.  Around 7% of this is likely to be used to power the AD plant itself, with any excess being sold on to National Grid.

"Malaby is the first of what we hope will be a number of companies to benefit from the anaerobic digestion loan fund and it is excellent to see such good progress being made at the Wiltshire plant," commented 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."

A maximum of £10 million is available, through individual loans ranging from £50,000 - £1 million over a five-year period. Applications for the current round can be submitted before 30th April.


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