Retro Rump marks brasserie’s 7th anniversary

Rump and Wade Brasserie has just celebrated its seventh anniversary after opening the million-pound investment addition to Hotel Cromwell, Stevenage, in April 2017.

With the brasserie having undergone a further half a millionpound refurbishment in 2023 and been reopened by the serving mayor of Stevenage, the brasserie has become an integral part of the Stevenage Old Town High Street.

With a core menu change every quarter and monthly specials menus, the British brasserie thrives with regular live music, happy hours, bottomless brunches and, more recently, a traditional afternoon tea menu that has been a huge hit!

Rump and Wade marked the anniversary with ‘Retro Rump’ specials menu, which included some of the original best-selling dishes.

To find out more visit: rumpandwade.co.uk

This question is something that is often asked of the team at the Hertfordshire Waste Partnership. Whether it’s something you’ve never considered, or are a little curious about, the answers are really quite interesting and might not be what you expected. News headlines and documentaries proclaim waste being dumped on foreign shores, but in Hertfordshire we track all the waste movements and know exactly where our waste goes, down to the individual processing plants.

How much waste is handled? In 2022/23, the last year for which full data has been analysed, 133,000 tonnes of dry recycling was collected by Councils from households and small businesses across Hertfordshire, together with 108,000 tonnes of garden waste and food waste.

In the case of the garden and food waste, almost all of it is processed in Hertfordshire itself or in adjacent council areas. Local plants process garden waste into agricultural grade composts, using the windrow system, essentially an industrial scale compost heap turned over mechanically. Food waste, on the other hand, must be treated to prevent the spread of pathogens which might harm livestock. Hertfordshire has examples of In Vessel Composting facilities which use heat to enable the safe processing of food waste. The output is composts, safe and suitable for spreading on farmland. The county also has Anaerobic Digestion plants which use a non-composting process to break down food waste and recover combustible gases such as methane which is then used on-site to generate electricity for the National Grid. In addition, a safe digestate fertiliser is also produced, which is again used for agriculture.

The location of the plants is shown on the map.

The processing of ‘dry materials’ – the recyclable items collected from your doorstep and those accepted at Recycling Centres - (plastics, glass, food and drink cans, paper, card and cardboard) is, given their variety, rather more complicated. Reprocessing materials collected for dry recycling will involve sorting and separating and then may include disassembly, cleaning, melting, granulating, pulping etc, in some cases at several different plants, to produce a raw material or component which can then be used for new products. These complex industrial processes are often part of international commodity markets, with Councils like Hertfordshire representing only part of the supply chain and may not all take place at home.

Nonetheless, and perhaps contrary to some prejudiced beliefs, more than 70% of the dry materials collected for recycling in Hertfordshire reaches a Final Destination (the point at which waste material becomes a valuable commodity) in the UK. Indeed, some materials, including the major commodity glass, are wholly reprocessed in the UK as shown below.

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Of those materials in part processed overseas, it is noteworthy that more than 90% of the plastics, steel cans and aluminium cans collected across Hertfordshire are reprocessed at plants in the UK. It is the card and cardboard sector in which most materials are exported for reprocessing, mainly to far Eastern locations. Textile exports are largely used clothing supplying African markets.

Table 2 Proportion of commodities reaching reprocessing Final Destinations overseas (major materials only) Commodity

The material collected in Hertfordshire can be traced to the specific reprocessing plant or to a reputable international commodity broker. In this way we can be confident that the material is genuinely being recycled.

The flows of dry recyclables from Hertfordshire can be seen on the map.