An incinerator at New Cross Hospital burns all clinical waste and the steam produced is used to heat the site.
The current incinerator has been used for more than two years. The first one, built in 1992, lasted 27 years.
Known as a ‘heat from waste’ plant, the steel-made machine with a refractory lining to provide high-temperature resistance burns up to 350 kilogrammes of waste an hour, reaching temperatures in excess of 1,100 degrees C.
In the summer, it can provide heat for virtually the entire hospital site, combined with a massive generator producing two megawatts of electricity.
From that, high-grade heat is generated which produces steam from the exhaust and low-grade heat from the coolants, or radiator section of the engine.
John Burrows, Energy Centre and Decontamination Manager, said:
We’re now incinerating about 34 tonnes (the other four tonnes comes from third parties) of waste a week, which has increased from 20 tonnes over the last five or six years.
We use the excess heat from incinerating the waste to generate steam for the site that in turn is used to generate heating, hot water and sterilisation for various uses. It’s like your boiler at home but we generate steam to transport energy around the site instead of hot water as it can contain more energy.
It sounds strange to say but we use heat even at the height of the summer, for domestic hot water and ventilation plants, for example.
We save £200,000 in gas a year by using the incinerator, but there are operational costs in running it and gas we have to pay for.
But that can be offset by income from third parties, and we take on about 20% of out-sourced waste, such as the City of Wolverhampton Council. It’s certainly a lot cheaper than us exporting our waste.
Janet Smith, Head of Sustainability at RWT, said:
The incinerator is one of the remaining five incinerators in England operated by an NHS Trust.
On top of providing safe disposal of clinical waste, it is also a vital part of the trust energy security strategy to generate low-carbon source of energy.
This includes onsite electricity generation via solar pv, and contributes to the reduction of the trust’s carbon emissions and dependence on imported oil and gas.
The incinerator is subject to the conditions of Wolverhampton City Council’s permit of continuous emission monitoring, which means it has to undergo annual emissions surveillance tests.
