Waste Recycling Group acquires UK recycler

Northampton, UK-based developer Waste Recycling Group said it acquired CAW Limited, a longtime collection-and-recycling company with annual revenue of about £5 million ($8.5 million USD).

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

WRG is one of the leading waste management firms in the UK. The company was purchased in 2006 for £1.4 billion by Spain’s Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas (MCE:FCC.MC).

WRG said in a release that the acquisition of Cumbria, UK-based CAW will help it expand its business in northwestern England. WRG takes in 13 million metric tons (14.3 million tons) of waste a year from residential, commercial and industrial customers.

WRG’s services include energy recovery, waste treatment, recycling and landfill disposal. Its energy-from-waste facility in Kent has a capacity of 500,000 metric tons a year and produces 35 megawatts of power, which is enough to power 60,000 homes. The accompanying recycling facility has a capacity of 65,000 metric tons. Both are among the largest such facilities in the country.

Its 150,000-metric ton Nottingham facility generates about 27 MW of energy from waste. The company has received approval to develop a third energy-from-waste facility in Hull with a capacity of 240,000 metric tons a year.

The company has also proposed several projects in the UK to recycle landfill waste into plant food. WRG says it wants to pump leachate, the liquid byproduct of decomposing waste, into lagoons in which bacteria breaks down contaminants. Those lagoons could then be used to irrigate and fertilize land for the energy crop willow coppice, which has the potential to be used for biofuels.

WRG's parent company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas (FCC) has recently entered the renewable energy market to insulate itself against the housing slump (see Spain's FCC inks $1.2 billion wind investment).

In August, the Madrid-based builder spent a $1.2 billion acquisition of Babcock & Brown Wind Partners' (ASX:BBW) wind energy assets in Spain. And in September, FCC bought two photovoltaic solar power plants in Spain with an installed capacity of 20 megawatts (see Spain's FCC buys solar plants for €140M).

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