Yorkshire Water is collaborating with the University of York to improve the performance of waste processing plants as part of plans to process all its sewage by anaerobic digestion by 2020.
Yorkshire Water collects sludge from across its region for treatment at its £72 million plant in Leeds, which opened in June as the country’s largest processor of its kind.
Yorkshire Water’s director of waste water service delivery, Ben Roche, said: “As an industry we have said that we will be carbon neutral by 2030 and anaerobic digestion plays a key role in this. By the end of the year we estimate we would have reduced our carbon footprint by 80 per cent over the past decade and reduced sludge treatment costs by a third over the past three years, but there is more to do.”
A pilot-scale digestor unit has been commissioned at the company’s Naburn sewage treatment works, which will allow laboratory results to be tested under realistic process conditions.
Prof Chong said: “Working with Yorkshire Water means that we are able to access real world feedstocks and digester contents and therefore address real world problems. The new facilities we’ve built in the Biology Department at York allow us to mimic large-scale installations and use state-of-the-art techniques to understand how the microbial communities that drive anaerobic digestion change in response to the material that enters the digesters.”