THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
When the landfill
has to stop
AAL Recycling is literally ‘cleaning up’ Jersey’s construction waste. Alasdair Crosby visited the managing director, Alan Langlois, at the company’s operational base at La Collette, where a new aggregate washing plant can clean waste and recycle it on a grand scale
R
emember the days - not so very long ago, really - when the coastline was at La Collette power station? When all the areas now beyond there and on the southern side of the Esplanade was all foreshore, and when at high tide on stormy days waves would crash over the seawall? All these reclaimed areas were created from landfill - the waste products of the construction industry. But now the landfill has to stop. There are no plans to extend the Island any further into the sea. Yet the waste keeps on coming and there is only a relatively small area that can still be filled.
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What will happen then when the available area is chock full? The answer can be expressed simply and briefly: ‘recycle’. And Alan Langlois’ company, AAL Recycling Ltd, is at the forefront of the drive to clean up waste and give it a new life by recycling it, rather than extracting or importing fresh supplies to further clog up the Island. AAL Recycling operates from an area at the far end of the La Collette reclamation area: a mountainous kingdom of clay, rubble, old glass, soil... waste coming in from the construction industry and recycled material awaiting delivery and reuse in the next stage of its existence.
‘In 2006 when I first got the recycling contract,’ Alan said, ‘the recycling rate was approximately 17,000 tons of building waste a year. We are now recycling 100,000 tons a year. It has been hugely successful, but the same quantity again - another 100,000 tons - is still going to landfill. Now, it’s almost full. ‘In essence, we are trying to recycle waste so it can be used again. But although recycling is rightly seen as “green”, there is still in many quarters a prejudice against recycled material, in that the perception is that it is of inferior quality to fresh material.’ So his company is on a mission to convince Islanders - be they construction companies, engineers, or landscape gardeners looking for topsoil of the merits of recycled material. This mission is helped by the acquisition last year of a giant ‘aggregate washing and grading machine’ imported from an Italian manufacturing company, Matec. They design and manufacture complete plants for many sectors, including aggregates, gravel, sand, stone, concrete, ceramic and glass.
