Saturday, November 10, 2018

Turning rubbish into pensions

Picture collage from a visit on Friday with Cllr Joshua Garfield, Newham Council Pension officer and our Canadian fund managers, Fiera Infrastructure (top left) to the Cory Riverside "energy from waste" plant in Belvedere, Bexley, Kent. 

Newham Council staff pension fund (LGPS) has invested in this company. Look to right side of collage, top to bottom for a outline of what this plant does.

Top right, a rubbish cart dumps rubbish, then a crane collects the rubbish and places it into a furness where the rubbish is burnt and provides the heat to make steam, which drives turbines to produce electricity. This electricity serves 160,000 London households. The "cake" from the burnt rubbish is then transported by barges along the River Thames to be turned into breeze blocks to build homes.  Apparently the pollutants caused by this process are lower than the "normal" air quality in the locality.

Obviously, due diligence was done to ensure that our pension fund investment in this plant was made on the basis of matching liabilities and maximising return but the idea that instead of expensive and wasteful landfill, rubbish is turned into electricity and into pensions is very attractive.

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