The Wood Recyclers’ Association (WRA) officially launched its Fire Prevention Plan (FPP) Guide at its members’ winter meeting in Coventry on 6 December.
The document is said to be the first sector-specific guide on Fire Prevention Plans (FPPs) to be produced. It has taken more than a year for the WRA to develop it, in close association with the Environment Agency.
The guide outlines the different fraction sizes of waste wood that may be stored and the differences in their storage requirements, and talks about seasonality challenges faced by the industry and how to explain these in an FPP.
Andy Hill, Chair of the WRA, Peter Buckley, the EA’s FPP specialist, and WRA Executive Director Julia Turner officially launched the guide in front of more than 100 WRA members who were attending a quarterly meeting in Coventry.
Andy said he was delighted wood recyclers finally had an EA approved guide which would help operators, both large and small, to meet the measures outlined in the FPP Guidance, or to propose alternative measures if they need to move away from the standard guidance.
“It was great to be able to actually hold an official published copy of the guide in our hands and show it to our members,” said Andy. “We have worked hard to get this far and hope it will make a real difference to our members and others seeking to achieve an FPP as part of their permit requirements.”
The WRA guide leads operators through a process to give them the best chance of getting approval for their FPP – a legal requirement for all sites storing combustible materials.
Julia Turner, Executive Director of the WRA, said: “We would like to thank everyone at the EA and our sector partners for helping us to get to this point. We are extremely proud to be the first trade body to launch a sector-specific guide for our members and hope this will mean many more wood recyclers and reprocessors will now be able to gain approved FPPs in a timely manner.”
The FPP Guide will be available to download from the WRA’s website at www.woodrecyclers.org.
