Derelict waste facilities near Leyland to be brought back to life as ‘Lancashire’s stomach’

Recycling lorry at Farington waste centre

Mothballed waste facilities near Leyland are to be brought back to life to help Lancashire meet a government demand for local authorities to start collecting leftover and unwanted food from households.

Weekly food waste collections have to be in place nationwide by April 2026 and Lancashire County Council cabinet members have agreed to restart anaerobic digestion equipment at the authority’s waste recovery centre in Farington in time to fulfil that obligation.

The specialist kit – which turns gas created from organic waste into electricity – has lain dormant for around a decade after a previous use of it was abandoned. The version of the process in operation at the time did not produce the gas in sufficient quantities, the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) understands.

Cabinet member for environment and climate change Shaun Turner said that the move to reintroduce the facilities made sense, joking that “not everybody has an anaerobic digester in their back garden”.

Since the collection of rubbish – as opposed to its processing – is a district council responsibility in Lancashire, precise arrangements for the bins or vessels that will be used to store waste food are yet to be decided. Food from the Blackpool Council area will be collected from households in the resort and also processed in Farington as a result of a waste disposal agreement between the authority and the county council.

One new piece of equipment, costing £1.4m, will be needed to remove any packaging contamination from the food waste, while a £1.1m investment will be made in bringing the existing anaerobic digestion infrastructure back into use.

However, a gas engine already in place on the Farington site would be able to produce enough electricity from the imported food waste not only to run the digestion facilities themselves, but to operate the whole of the waste plant – saving the county council just over £4m a year.

Removing food from Lancashire’s general domestic waste will save a further £4.3m compared to using it to create refuse-derived fuel, as is the case currently.

While it is estimated that processing the county’s food waste in-house will cost County Hall approximately £800,000 per year more than the £1.2m market would charge, there are currently no third-party food waste facilities available in Lancashire – and, once the other savings have been factored in, the county will still be £6.34m better off overall.

The savings – and the upfront investment costs – will be split between Lancashire County Council and Blackpool Council on an 87.5 per cent to 12.5 per cent ratio.

County Cllr Turner said that there was a clear “net benefit” from the proposal, while in a show of cross-party agreement, the deputy leader of the Labour opposition group, Lorraine Beavers, said that the ruling Tories had “done some really good work” on the plans.

Households in Preston used to have a dedicated food waste service until it was scrapped almost ten years ago.

It is estimated that around 40,000 tonnes of food waste will be generated by doorstep collections in Lancashire, while the combined capacity of the facilities at both Farington and another site in Thornton, in Wyre, totals 60,000 tonnes.

The cabinet meeting at which the plan was agreed heard that while it is the Farington plant whose anaerobic digestion capability will be brought back on stream initially, the same equipment at the Thornoton plant could eventually be reintroduced, either as an overspill or to accept commercial food waste.

New process works ‘like human stomach’

The anaerobic digestion system at Lancashire’s waste plants was originally designed to produce electricity from so-called “residual waste” – material not sent for recycling.

A spokesperson for Lancashire County Council told the LDRS: “As a ‘fuel’ for the process, this never worked as well as anticipated, but some of the equipment used…is exactly the same as used in anaerobic digestion processes, so we can utilise [these facilities] now, accordingly.

“Pure food waste is perfectly suited as the fuel, as anaerobic digestion works very similarly to a human stomach in digesting food and creating gas.”

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