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Waste & recycling

The Incinerator Plant

At the end of the depot road, off Harewood Avenue

The end of the line for everything the town throws away. Both of the council’s rounds finish here: the bin wagon off the terraces, and the fly-tip flatbed with Wozza at the wheel and whatever the lanes gave up that morning on the back. The flatbed pulls onto the tipping apron, the bed is emptied, and it is back down the road to the depot.

It is an energy-from-waste plant. The tipping hall is a hundred and twenty metres long in blue profiled steel, with five pyramid roof lights along its ridge; beside it stands the boiler house in stepped, board-marked concrete, a small brick office, and the chimney. The chimney is eighty-two metres high, more than twice the height of St Cuthbert’s spire, and you can see it from the river bank and across the rooftops of the whole estate.

Red-brick terraces from above, and on the skyline a tall thin chimney beside a church tower and spire.
The chimney and St Cuthbert’s spire, side by side on the skyline.

The apron is twenty-four metres by fifteen, with a wheel stop twenty-five centimetres high along its edge and, beyond it, the slope down into the furnace. The lorries have a second way out as well: Clinker Lane, three hundred and forty-three metres at thirty miles an hour, from the tipping yard down to Strelby Avenue.

It stands on a two hundred and forty by two hundred metre pad more than half a mile out of the centre, at the end of a five-hundred-and-sixty-metre access road that runs past the depot and meets Harewood Avenue at the lights. Seven hundred and eleven metres from the nearest house. That is not an accident of planning; it is the whole point of where it is.

Across a river and a ring road, a long blue industrial hall and a tall thin chimney stand in open fields under a blue sky.
From the town bank of the river: the tipping hall and the chimney, out in the fields past the ring road.

If you came looking for a garbage truck simulator, the bin round is the one with the lorry, and every round of it finishes at this chimney.

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