New Eco Park headlines green scheme as council plans cuts to carbon emissions.
A new, modern waste recovery plant is being planned by Milton Keynes City Council in a move that could turn the area into one of the UK’s most sustainable places to sort rubbish.
The council wants to bin its current waste facility in Wolverton and turn the site into a state-of-the-art Eco Park that could provide green energy to the city for a more sustainable future.
MK has been using clean methods that turn household rubbish into sustainable electricity for the last six years, meaning hardly any of the region’s waste has gone to landfill.
Now it has revealed plans for the technologically advanced Eco Park that will reduce the city’s growing carbon emissions and help it become one of Britain’s most environmental places to manage and reuse waste.
Councillors say there are many benefits that the Eco Park can provide for local people, including:
- Distributing heat naturally created by processing waste across the city into homes and businesses
- Generating more energy so the city’s waste collection and landscaping fleet becomes powered entirely by waste
- New technology to shred unwanted tyres into material that would be used to build and repair roads
- A carbon sink forest that would absorb carbon from the atmosphere
- New facilities to deal with more types of waste locally, including electrical goods and other hard-to-process items
The council’s investment into developing the Eco Park would mean lower processing costs over the longer term, delivering better value for money, it says. In addition, the site would be made more efficient to manage the extra waste being produced by the growing city.
It would also be home to a public education centre, says the council, to help the next generation become even better at reuse and recycling. A decision on whether to approve the plans will be made by the council next week.
Last year, MKCC announced local recycling had risen by a third since it introduced wheelie bins in September 2023, making it one of the top performing cities for recycling in the UK.
The council has also published a separate proposal to replace MK’s three current tips – Newport Pagnell, New Bradwell and Bleak Hall – with two modern reuse and recycling sites in the north and south of the city. It claims the larger, greener sites in locations with less congestion would accept a wider range of items as well as offering reuse facilities.
But opponents to that scheme have said that it could mean longer journeys to the tip for some households, leading to greater fuel use, more congestion and an increase in the likelihood of fly-tipping.
“Milton Keynes has been at the forefront of recycling ever since we introduced the UK’s first kerbside recycling collections in the early 90s, and the Wolverton Eco Park continues that great tradition,” said Cllr Lauren Townsend, Deputy Leader of the Council.
“Opening such a state-of-the-art green facility brings clear benefits to the city and fits our ambitions to be a world-leading sustainable city.”
