Tag: utopia

August 21st – I had stuff to do in Aldridge on the way home, and Northgate was solid with traffic, so I cut down past the back of the Vigo landfill to hop on the canal at Brickyard Road. I noticed that the final work seems to be going on with sealing this immense refuse tip. It was capped with a top layer of marl a while ago, and landfill gas is still being abstracted and used to power a large generating set, supplying power to the national grid; but amongst the bulkheads and snaking pipes, a plastic membrane has been laid and it’s being covered in topsoil, prior to final landscaping.

The membrane prevents rainwater from getting through the cap and soaking through the refuse, where it would be extracted and disposed of as a toxic brew called leachate, which is an ongoing, expensive operation.

Reducing leachate production also lowers the future chances of groundwater pollution.

Landfill is quite a high-tech operation these days, if carried out properly.

February 27th – A lot of the history of Brownhills, Walsall Wood and Aldridge is about what lies beneath. Coal, clay, industrial effluent and landfill have shaped particularly the borderlands between Walsall Wood and Aldridge. Where brick marls were abundant, soon voids in the ground where they had been extracted were too. Into these holes, we tipped refuse in huge quantities, as the remaining clay made a good seal against the contaminant waste.

In the early days, the landfill and waste disposal industry was unregulated, haphazard, and somewhat akin to the Wild West. Waste was put anywhere, and unmonitored. These days, it’s a tightly monitored industry that has to look after its dirty secrets. 

At the Vigo Utopia landfill site just off Coppice Lane, gas turbine engines run 24 hours a day, driving electricity generators from the gasses harvested from the decomposing rubbish. This produces significant amounts of power from 2 generator sets in converted shipping containers, employing gas that would once have been merely vented to the atmosphere. 

Nearby, a series of bunds and pools lined with thick rubber gather water and liquid pumped from deep within the mound. This poisonous soup is called ‘leechate’, and is allowed to settle out before being disposed of as hazardous effluent. Again, years ago, such concerns were not addressed and sites were allowed to pollute groundwater uncontrolled.

This is ugly, scarred landscape; but we are looking after it much better than we used to.

January 5th – In the New Year Quiz on my main blog this year, I asked about the bulkhead pipes visible sticking from the mounds of a couple of local landfill sites; the answer was that they were gas collection points, to feed a gas turbine that generated electricity from the otherwise wasted methane evolved when the buried refuse decomposes.

This plant – humming away continuously in the way only a gas turbine can – is just off Brickyard road in Aldridge and has been running for at least 3 years fuelled by as from the Vigo Utopia landfill, generating electricity which is fed back into the national grid.

Refuse operators will paint this as ‘green energy’ – it’s no such thing; it’s not renewable, is finite and is no cleaner than any other methane power plant. It is, however, making use of gas that formerly would have been wasted, so it’s a good thing.

There is a similar setup at Highfields South, not more than a mile away.

15th July The landfill operation at the former Vigo Utopia marlpit, in Coppice Lane, Walsall Wood, is nearly complete, which must be a relief for nearby residents who’ve endured two decades of smell and nuisance. What many people don’t know is that this site generates 2MW of electricity and feeds it back into the national grid. That’s enough to power nearly 4,000 homes. Bores are drilled into the decaying landfill content, lined, and the gas of decomposition is pumped out and employed to power two gas engines driving generators. The gas would otherwise be wasted. 

When I passed the site at 5:30pm on a Friday, the plant was humming away. I believe a similar operation is planned for Highfields South landfill, opposite Jockey Meadows.