From 60,000-tyre scrapyard to Shropshire nature site - watch the work get under way
It was a scrapyard, filled with 60,000 tyres. But, very slowly and surely, this little piece of Shropshire is being returned to nature.
Shropshire Wildlife Trust bought the former Furber’s car breakers yard at Whixall in North Shropshire as part of a project to restore the wildlife habitats on the edge of Whixall Moss.
And for the past fortnight tyres that piled high on the land have been taken away.
Colin Preston, chief executive of the trust said: "This is a significant moment in the remediation project. The abandoned tyres posed a health and safety, and an environmental risk, but we’ve had to go through official processes to clear them from the site."
The contract to clear the tyres was awarded to Berkshire based firm Intowaste Limited after a tender process. Intowaste will reprocess all of the tyres after they leave the site.
David Parkes, a director of Intowaste said: "Tyre clearance contracts are our speciality. Sixty thousand tyres may sound a lot but we have lots of experience with volumes this size and larger. It’s important that reprocessing is sustainable and the tyres are recycled.
"The tyres will be processed into alternative to fossil fuels for use in power and cement plants. We also want to cause the minimum inconvenience to local residents."
Oil, wing mirrors and bumpers
The tyres will be completely removed by the end of March and then a second contract will be awarded to remove the remainder of the scrap on the site, including thousands of litres of disused oil and tonnes of wing mirrors and bumpers.
After that, it will be cleaned and some of it will be turfed to allow plants and animals to recolonise what was once a peatbog.
Cleaning up the scrapyard, which closed recently after 50 years in business, forms part of a project to restore several areas of Fenns, Whixall, Bettisfield and Wem Mosses that has received grants from the European Union LIFE fund and Heritage Lottery Fund.
The scrapyard is itself part-designated as a special area of conservation because it sits on top of two metres of deep peat.
The trust is aiming to raise £500,000 to complete the project which also aims to restore swamp, fen, willow and alder carr wet woodland, habitats missing from the edge of the bog to provide homes for willow and marsh tit and rare bog wildlife.
