Charles Trent Ltd recently posted a blog announcing plans for the ‘largest project to be undertaken in their 90+ year history’ following a public consultation, held on 25th October 2018.
Their aim is to recycle 100% and to achieve this, modernisation of their facilities is on the cards.
Currently, they have several warehouses and storage facilities located throughout their Poole site that hold different parts removed during the dismantling process. However, these storage solutions they say are inefficient for the scale that they currently (and plan) to operate to.
The main proposal is to demolish their existing warehouses and bring all operations under one new building. Moving the dismantling of cars from outdoors into the new building will reduce noise on site.
This new indoor facility will be a reverse manufacturing centre for car recycling, including having its own vehicle production line, and parts storage.
The dismantling of cars will be partly automated with machines separating the parts and conveyor belts moving the parts for recycling.
Their new facility will be open 24 hours a day, which is no different to their current operational allowance. The significant factor is that the main elements of the operation will now be inside the new building and will thus not be audible outside of the site boundaries. They will operate two shifts in order to increase the number of cars they able to recycle, however there will be no traffic movements to site at night. Having two shifts also means they can increase their workforce by a further 50-60 staff, thereby benefitting the local economy. The processes and operations have been assessed by acoustic engineers who confirm that operations within the building will not be discernible outside the site boundaries.
The building itself will provide a single large covered working and storage area within a structure which is 12m high up to the eaves and which covers approx. 8500 sq m. The proposed colour palette of the building is blue to blend into the sky.
The proposed development lies in an existing Employment Area, as designated in the Borough of Poole’s Core Strategy.
The new building will be situated on the least sensitive part of the site furthest from residential properties. It will enclose many of the existing activities that take place in the open or within buildings which are currently closer, or adjacent to residential properties. The building will not be visible in the immediate streets because of frontage development but there will be instances where it will be visible, for example gaps between buildings. It is an industrial building within an industrial area and, due to the setback, it is well within the site, so will not be prominent.
The only aspect of their business that will not be in the new building is vehicle storage. Currently, some of our vehicles are stacked neatly in a state-of-the-art car stacker while others are placed on top of each other. This new building will free up land and enable them to stack all vehicles in the more modern and cleaner way. The car stacking does not require planning permission but is shown as part of the overall reorganisation and improvements to the operations.
Managing Director, Marc Trent said, “Charles Trent has always been at the forefront of vehicle recycling since the mid-1990s, when we first introduced computerisation, modern warehouses and fully concreted surfaces. These innovations were a stark contrast to the fairly primitive industry processes used to extract parts and recycle end of life vehicles. Since then, only small changes have been introduced until now. Charles Trent are about to embark on a multi million pound project to bring to life a world-class vehicle recycling facility. This facility will take 18 months to build and will be fully operational by quarter 2 in 2020.”
To read more about this project click on the following link: www.trents.co.uk
