London Olympia

Waste and recycling at EC&O Venues:

EC&O Venues are constantly looking at the best ways to reduce their impact on the environment and a large part of that for their venues is to reduce the amount of waste they send to landfill. 

At their venues they work with the organisers to minimise the waste left at the end of each event and impose where appropriate excessive waste charges to cover the disposal of show waste.

They have installed 2 balers and set aside a small area for storing bales and skip for paper and wood for recycling. Glass is also collected and sent for recycling.

Food waste is collected in purple bins and sent to an anaerobic digestion plant where it is mixed with pig manure, pasteurised, fermented and the methane taken off to drive electrical turbines, and then the rich slurry that remains is put back onto farmers fields as a fertiliser. The whole process is a carbon positive process. Since they introduced this initiative in July last year they have sent 16.88 Tonnes of food for reprocessing which has generated 3376KW of energy, enough electricity to boil 1182 kettles for 1hr.

All the carpets laid in the halls for each show is sent for reprocessing and from 1st January to  31st March they sent 115,551m2 of carpet for recycling back into plastic polymer and passed it back into the Plastic Industry’s food chain. This has saved; 168 Tonnes of CO2 emission, 91 Tonnes of Crude Oil. The energy saving is equivalent to powering an average family car for 11 years!

The limited amount of space and the very short turnaround times for the halls means that they are not able to sort as much waste as we would like on site and have to use the more expensive waste transfer stations and waste for energy plants to ensure they divert as much waste from landfill as possible.  However, they have reduced our waste in 2008 by around 300 Tonnes to 1029 Tonnes.  Of which they recycled 67% to the total waste by using transfer stations and waste for energy plants and a further 7% by sorting out recyclables on site.

Have a look at London Olympia's sustainabilty initiatives.