The Milton Keynes Waste Recovery Park is expected to handle 80,000 tonnes of residual waste annually. The project features three primary buildings:
- a Mechanical treatment facility to extract recyclable materials from residual waste
- an Anaerobic digester to convert food and organic waste into renewable energy creating a compost-like output for use on brownfield sites
- an Advanced thermal treatment facility to turn any remaining, unrecyclable waste into a gas, which is combusted to generate high temperature steam producing renewable electricity in a turbine.
The buildings on the site are tailored to each individual process with significant structural challenges including a 10m high waste bunker with two overhead travelling cranes, 48m span rafters in the mechanical treatment hall and a 55m high steel stack. The project featured full level 2 BIM co-ordination of architecture, services and structure with the tier 2 contractors for each facility also integrating their tailored requirements into the final model.