City of Glasgow College
Sector: Education
Equipment: A900 Rocket Composter
The backstory
The City of Glasgow College is Scotland’s second largest technical and professional skills college and is recognised as being one of the top two performing colleges in the UK for ‘World Skills’ – which raises standards in apprenticeships and technical education.
Alongside its esteemed academic reputation, it’s also an establishment that is passionate about doing its bit for the planet and make its day-to-day operations even more sustainable. For instance, the twin-site super campus is built to BREEAM ‘excellent’ standards – seeing it feature a combined heat and power system, solar thermal heating, rainwater harvesting technology, and more recently a Rocket Composter.
The challenge
The site generates an estimated 26 tonnes of food waste per year across its campus, and under Scottish law, any organisation that generates such wastage must separate it and send it for off-site treatment by anaerobic digestion or composting.
As a result, this saw food waste being collected twice weekly from the city-centre-based site, by dedicated collection vehicles.
But for a college that had invested in such a sustainable campus, it sought to go one step further than relying on third-party disposal methods by further adding to the eco credentials and carbon reductions for not only the campus, but Glasgow as a city.
The solution
After spending time talking to and visiting other Scottish colleges – such as Dundee and Angus College – which use Tidy Planet’s on-site in-vessel composting systems, City of Glasgow
College decided to follow suit and invest in the same solution.
The equipment in question that would help the College close the food waste management loop was an A900 Rocket Composter — the perfect machine to enable the site to go one step higher up the Waste Hierarchy by composting its organic waste at source.
Prior to installing the composting technology, the Tidy Planet team also carried out a site survey and study on the waste arisings to ensure that this model would be suitable for the volume of material being produced.
Being able to collect, segregate, and compost its food waste on site not only allows the institution to generate a valuable, nutritious compost resource, but it also greatly reduces the campus’s carbon emissions. Gone are the days when external food waste disposal trucks are needed to transport the waste off site.
It’s an educational establishment which is truly at the forefront of sustainability.
“Prior to being able to compost on site, we always sent our food waste for AD to be recovered. But with the Rocket Composter, we’re going one step higher up in the Waste Hierarchy and recycling them on site, allowing us to autonomously reduce our carbon footprint, as well as our expenditure on disposal trucks.”
Fergal McCauley, Head of Facilities Management at City of Glasgow College.