Road Water Recycling at the Billesdon ‘Living Water’ Recycling Facility

There are approximately 115,000 roadside gullies in Leicestershire, collecting the rainfall that runs off the road.

These gullies generate about 2,600 tonnes of wet sludgy waste - this is enough to fill six Olympic-size swimming pools!

It is mainly made up of silt and water, along with minor contaminants such as oil and fuel from traffic, as well as salt from winter gritting.

Ordinarily, this sludgy waste would be sent to landfill, which costs £57 per tonne to tip (at 2009 prices for tipping of contaminated waste).

In 2003, the Environment and Transport Department joined forces with ‘Living Water’, a specialist waste management system design company, to develop a new technology for the treatment and recycling of this contaminated road water run-off (or gully water).

A new facility was built near Billesdon in 2004.

In short, the ‘Living Water’ recycling facility extracts water from the gully residue. This reduces the landfill waste down to 1,325 tonnes of relatively dry material (which can be re-used in other highways operations.)

The extracted water is then purified and filtered back into a specially-created lake which now forms a popular public amenity area at Billesdon.

Special lorry-mounted vacuum tankers suck up the waste from the roadside gullies and take it to the recycling facility at Billesdon for treatment.

Once there the entire load is tipped into the receiving bays to allow the dirty water to separate from the solid materials. The solid materials are then screened and taken away for re-use elsewhere.

The dirty water runs off through a series of pipes and manholes to a filter system made up of straw bales, where naturally occurring enzymes start the process of breaking down, and absorbing contaminants.

 

After filtering through the straw bales the water enters the first of a series of four reed beds. The reeds planted in these beds thrive on the elements found in this water and take up the remaining impurities.

 

The clean water then returns to the natural environment via the specially constructed lake into an adjacent stream, which is a tributary to the River Sence.

The original outlay for the facility was in the region of £150,000. As a result of the savings made through reduced tipping costs, the facility has had the equivalent of a 2-year rate of return.

Practical benefits of the scheme include:

From the outset, the local Billesdon community were involved with the development of the facility.

Billesdon Parish Council and residents assisted in the creation of an attractive public amenity area, formed from the output of the process.

We are led to believe that the Billesdon Living Water Recycling facility is the first local authority-driven road water recycling scheme in the UK.

In October 2009, Billesdon Living Water were ‘Highly Commended’ in the Environmental Sustainability Infrastructure Category at the Constructing Excellence Regional Awards.

  

Further to this, later in the same month, it was the winner of the Environmental Sustainability in the Highways Sector’ in the Highways Magazine Excellence Awards 2009.

A leaflet on the Billesdon Living Water recycling scheme can be downloaded here.  (PDF file size 1.9 mb)

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