Our business and climate change
Esken provides important low carbon infrastructure to support the UK transition to a low carbon economy. This includes supporting rail links, circular energy solutions and by providing efficient airport operations.
Biomass energy
Esken Renewables supports biomass power plants throughout the UK and the business continues to play a vital role in delivering the UK’s renewable energy effort. We recover waste wood for use as fuel by our customers under long-term contracts which supply the annual electricity needs of approximately 2% of the UK’s population. We have diverted a total of 2.5 million tonnes of waste wood and refuse derived fuel from landfill since 2018, which included a volume of approximately 1.2 million tonnes in 2019/20.
We adopt a sustainable model that is based on ‘keeping things local’ to minimise any unnecessary movement of waste, while providing energy solutions to the locations that are producing the waste. We aim to create a circular waste management solution where waste is only turned into fuel as a last resort, and all by-products of the waste management process are recycled wherever possible. We seek out innovation to challenge the status quo so that we can harness improvements for sustainable energy solutions for the future.
Waste to energy
We continually evaluate how we manage our waste and implement initiatives to reduce our landfill waste. In 2019/20, 99.5% of our waste was recycled or converted into energy.