Waste

LondonEnergy is the new name for LondonWaste, which provides waste management services for the North London Waste Authority. The company’s energy recovery facilities provide enough to power more than 80,000 homes and businesses in north London, and in doing so, diverts more than 698,000 tonnes of waste away from landfill each year.
Environment Journal spoke to the company’s managing director, Peter Sharpe, about the firm’s new name and why the circular economy is more important than ever.

What was the main idea behind the recent rebranding?

There were several drivers to it. The main one was to have the company’s name more closely associated with what the company now does. The name LondonWaste accurately described what the company did two decades ago, when landfill played a very significant part in the services it delivered to north London. Now alongside a lot of other companies, which operate in the same space, things are very different. Last year, of the three quarters of a million tonnes of waste we received and collected, we diverted over 92% away from landfill. Increasingly, the company is looking to energy in the broadest sense as to what the company does: the generation of energy from waste as a sustainable energy source, and also what the company does putting products back into the secondary resource market.

Over the past year, the so-called Blue Planet effect has generated a huge public interest in plastic waste and recycling. Thomas Barrett spoke to three businesses who have turned what’s old into new and recycled their way to profits.

Harsha Rathnayake is a self-styled ‘trash tycoon’, who owns Junk Hunters, an environmental waste collection service.