A LOT of the work at MJ Church is rubbish – and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

The multi-million pound operation encompasses landscaping, civil engineering, earthworks, consultancy and plant hire, but helping people and companies safely get rid of things they don’t want is a major part of its work.

Its Swindon collection point – at Marshgate – is one of several across the region; the main site is in Chippenham.

Thanks to last year’s disastrous fire at Averies and the messy winding-up of that firm, the image of the industry as a whole has taken a knock.

This upsets MJ Church operations manager Ben Staff, a nine-year veteran of the company.

“Of course it does,” he said. “It’s very much a changing industry, an industry that’s modernising very quickly as alternative technologies come along like the waste-to-energy route, and it’s an industry that’s increasingly managed, run and worked in by professionals.”

The firm invited the Swindon Advertiser to hear another side of the story.

MJ Church was founded in 1974 by Mike and Paula Church, who retain a strong interest to this day.

It has grown from running a single skip lorry to having about 400 staff, 75 HGVs, 27 skip and container vehicles and 120 pieces of plant ranging from excavators to giant pieces of equipment.

Customers range from some of the biggest builders in Britain to householders having a bit of a clear-out. Staff range from post-graduate environmental scientists to heavy plant operators and people sorting items on the picking station conveyor belt for recycling.

Over the years they’ve encountered everything from banknotes and bullets to a dead badger, but they mostly deal with more conventional detritus.

“We divert between 95 and 99 per cent of the waste that comes through these places away from landfill,” said Ben.

Of about 50,000 tonnes of refuse coming in every year, all but perhaps 1,000 or 1,500 tonnes is recycled.

“When somebody chucks something into a skip there can be anything in there. Wood is recovered as a separate fraction and that might go to a conventional route such as a board mill for recovery back into chipboard or plyboard.

“It might go for animal bedding or it might go for biomass fuel.

“The other things that might be in your skip at home are soils and stones, so we recover them and might recycle them ourselves into aggregate for use in construction projects.

“We might utilise soils to restore a landfill site or an old quarry.

“The other things that might be in your skip are plastics, and we try as hard as we can to recover those plastics back into individual product streams.”

Outside the language of the industry, this might mean uPVC becoming another generation of uPVC and plastic becoming the next generation of plastic.

Many items incapable of being recycled are shipped to the Continent, where they provide fuel for advanced waste-to-energy power stations. At this moment there are people in various parts of Europe warming themselves near heaters partly fuelled by Swindon’s refuse.

Ben added: “Our waste might be going into a district energy plant where it provides heat and electricity for a thousand homes, or it might be going to a conventional waste-to-energy plant where it’s combusted through very sophisticated and advanced technologies to generate electricity.

“It’s a genuine fossil fuel substitute.”

The short list of items which can’t be recycled or otherwise put to good use includes asbestos, the deadly substance once thought to be a fireproof wonder material. This is one of the few things still put into landfills – although modern landfills are sealed with impregnable clay walls and are a world away from the old ‘hole in the ground’ approach.

Those old landfills are coming back to haunt current generations with such poisonous delights as methane and hydrogen sulphide gas. MJ Church is one of the firms sometimes called on to excavate them and make sites safe for development.

“It’s amazing when you see it done,” said Ben. “You just have a load of black stuff – horrible, stinking, horrendous stuff – but then you come across a pocket that’s been completely starved of oxygen for whatever reason. You’ll see a newspaper that you can still read.”

Ultimate responsibility for the future of the environment, he insists, lies not just with companies such as MJ Church but also with the rest of us.

“Most of us, I think, want to make the decision that we don’t want our material to go to landfill. We want it recovered, we want it treated responsibly and that’s a decision we make.

“The choices are all yours.”