Sectors

Waste Handling Cranes & Lifting Equipment for Energy, Waste & Recycling

Grab cranes, process cranes and ATEX-rated lifting equipment for waste transfer stations, MRFs and energy-from-waste plants — engineered, installed, maintained and certified in-house across the UK and Ireland.

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Waste Management & Energy Recovery Lifting Solutions

Waste and energy recovery sites work their lifting equipment harder than almost any other industry. A bunker crane at an energy-from-waste plant or a transfer station can run for a whole shift, on a load nobody can specify in advance.

That one fact drives most of the engineering that follows. Duty classification, grab type and volume, rope and sheave wear rates, brake and gearbox service intervals, and how often the equipment must be examined all follow from continuous-duty handling of abrasive, contaminated and variable material. Equipment specified for intermittent workshop lifting does not last in a waste bunker.

WH Scott Group works across the waste chain — municipal and commercial transfer stations, materials recovery facilities (MRFs), energy-from-waste and biomass plants, anaerobic digestion and biogas sites, RDF and SRF production, and metals and plastics reprocessing. Where a site also generates electricity, we can also support your site; power and energy sector.

The group has designed, maintained and examined safety-critical lifting equipment since 1897 and now completes over 400,000 statutory examinations a year across the UK and Ireland. Crane design and fabrication, grab supply and refurbishment, installation, maintenance, thorough examination and accredited materials testing are all held in-house — so a defect found during an examination can be quoted, repaired and re-certified without the job leaving the group.

The scale that involves is best shown by the work at SUEZ’s Victoria Road waste transfer site in London, where two manually operated 7.5-tonne cranes dating from 1978 were replaced with two fully automated 8-tonne waste handling cranes. The facility handles around 140,000 tonnes of household waste a year, and throughput rose 20% after the first week of full automation.

Key Lifting & Safety Challenges in Waste and Energy Recovery

Continuous duty, not occasional lifting. Bunker and grab cranes are among the hardest-worked lifting assets in industry. Duty group, structural fatigue, gearbox and brake wear and rope life have to be assessed against real cycles per hour, not nameplate capacity alone. A maintenance interval copied across from a workshop crane will be wrong.

A load you cannot specify. Mixed waste varies in density, shape and moisture from grab to grab. Compacted bales, loose residual waste, wet organics and the occasional item that should never have entered the stream each load the grab, the hoist and the structure differently. Grab selection and closing force matter as much as rated capacity.

Abrasion, contamination and corrosion. Grabs, ropes, sheaves, chains and structural welds work in dust, moisture, leachate and chemically aggressive residues. Wear is fast and not always where you expect it, which is why rope and sheave condition and weld integrity are worth examining on their own terms rather than inside a general visual check.

Fire risk in the bunker. Self-heating in stored waste, and lithium batteries entering the stream, make bunker fires a live operational risk — and one that bears directly on lifting. Crane structures and cabling sit above the bunker, and the crane is often what has to break up and move a hot load. Detection and remote operation belong in the lifting design rather than alongside it: at Victoria Road, the control room carries live feeds from ten cameras including thermal imaging for fire detection.

Explosive atmospheres. Anaerobic digestion, biogas, landfill gas and some dust-generating processes create areas classified under DSEAR, where lifting equipment has to be selected and certified for the zone. Standard hoists and controls are not suitable, and mis-classifying a zone is a compliance failure as much as a safety one.

Interfacing with process plant. Where a crane feeds a hopper, conveyor, baler or feed chute on a fixed cycle, it is part of the process line rather than a standalone machine. Semi-automatic and automatic bunker management, anti-collision, load indication and remote control all have to work with the rest of the plant.

Ageing plant and obsolete parts. A good deal of UK and Irish waste infrastructure still runs cranes installed decades ago. The question is usually whether to modernise or replace, and it usually turns on two things: whether the structure is sound, and whether parts can still be obtained.

How WH Scott Group Supports Waste & Energy Recovery Operators

Grab crane systems. WH Scott is UK sales agent for MRS-Greifer GmbH, supplying clamshell, orange peel, dredging and timber grabs with capacities up to 30 tonnes and volumes from 0.1 to 50 m³. That covers grab selection for a particular waste stream, supply, refurbishment of worn grabs, and automation upgrades for waste, biomass and bulk handling plants.

Process and bunker cranes. Process crane systems engineered around the duty cycle, the building and the material rather than adapted from a catalogue machine, including semi-automatic and fully automatic bunker management. Standard overhead and gantry crane systems run from 100 kg to 250 tonnes.

Automation and remote control. AUTEC radio remote control with TÜV-certified fail-safe design, including EX-rated variants for hazardous areas, plus automated guided vehicles where material has to move across a site as well as within a bay.

Explosion-proof lifting equipment. ATEX-compliant cranes, hoists and controls for gas and dust hazardous areas in zones 1/21 and 2/22, with design, supply and certification handled as one package.

Statutory inspection and certification. Thorough examination under LOLER, inspection under PUWER, and examination to S.I. 299 for sites in the Republic of Ireland, carried out by LEEA-qualified competent persons. That extends to the lifting chains used to raise and lower submersible pumps in wet wells — a duty that combines lifting risk with confined space and contamination. Reports are issued digitally through the CoreRFID portal, so certification for a multi-site estate sits in one place.

Maintenance, breakdown cover and modernisation. Planned preventative maintenance on Bronze, Silver or Gold terms — Gold adds quarterly visits, vibration analysis and 24/7 emergency support — backed by a support line staffed 24/365. Where a crane is sound but dated, modernisation covers inverter control to reduce sway, anti-collision, load limiting and indication, radio remote and regeneration drives.

Design, fabrication and installation. Structural steelwork for lifting equipment is designed, cut, welded, fabricated and installed by the group’s own engineers, with CE/UKCA marking approval up to execution class EXC2 and welders trained to coded specifications. That matters most when a runway extension or new support steel sits on the critical path of a shutdown.

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Whether you need a single piece of equipment or a fully engineered lifting system, our specialists can help. Tell us your load, environment and compliance requirements — we’ll do the rest.

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Compliance & Regulations

Lifting operations on waste and energy recovery sites are governed principally by the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations (LOLER) 1998 and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) 1998. Between them they require lifting equipment to be suitable for its intended use, properly maintained, examined by a competent person, and supported by records that stand up to scrutiny.

Under LOLER, thorough examination is required before first use, after installation or assembly at a new site, following exceptional circumstances such as damage or a long period out of use, and then at intervals in service:

Every 6 months — lifting accessories, and any equipment used to lift or carry people. On a waste site that covers slings, shackles and below-the-hook gear, along with man-riding functions where they are fitted.
Every 12 months — other lifting equipment, including overhead, gantry and process cranes, grabs and hoists.
In line with a written scheme of examination — where a competent person sets risk-based intervals under Regulation 9(3)(a)(iii). For continuous-duty bunker and grab cranes this is often the more realistic route, because a flat twelve-month interval does not reflect how hard the equipment is actually worked. WH Scott can draw up and administer the scheme.

Republic of Ireland. Irish sites fall under the Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations 2007. Examination periods are set per equipment class under Schedule 1 rather than by a single flat interval, a competent person may specify a shorter period where they judge it necessary, and where immediate cessation of work has been advised a copy of the report goes to the Health and Safety Authority within 20 days. The HSA guide to work equipment sets out the framework.

Explosive atmospheres. Where biogas, landfill gas or combustible dust is present, DSEAR and the ATEX requirements apply to lifting equipment as much as to process plant. Zone classification is what determines equipment selection and certification.

Other standards commonly in scope. BS 7121 for the safe use of cranes, BS EN 1090 for fabricated steel structures, PSSR where pressure systems are present, and COSHH where extraction and dust control form part of the site’s control measures. HSE’s waste and recycling guidance and the guidance published by the Waste Industry Safety and Health Forum (WISH) set out the sector expectations an inspector will work from.