The new green face of incineration technology

Chris Williams is an entrepreneur with a lot on his mind. Within six to eight weeks, he hopes to finalise a funding deal worth £420m that will enable him to build a waste processing plant in Peterborough which he claims will turn 650,000 tonnes of rubbish every year into renewable energy and recycled materials.  A group of six American insurance and pension fund investors is poised to lend him the money, Williams says, against the income he will receive from UK power companies for electricity generated from rubbish and from the sale of reclaimed materials.

'We are extremely close,' says Williams. 'The UK banks are in an atrocious state... [but] the States are eager to be involved.' If the funding deal comes off, Williams should be able to start building the plant this year.

Williams is managing director of Peterborough Renewable Energy Ltd, known as PREL. The company, which won planning permission for the plant from the Department for Energy and Climate Change in November last year, promises to use state-of-the-art technology to extract the maximum possible value from the waste it processes.

First, recyclable materials such as plastic and metal will be removed from the waste using...

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