January Newsletter

Gill Weeks OBE, was appointed as a Non-Executive Director with immediate effect earlier this month.

With a scientific and legal background and widely considered to be an industry expert within the field of waste, environment and resource management, Gill has chaired key government, trade body and Environment Agency committees and has served on the Environment Agency Board.

As a leader of compliance and regulatory teams in global environmental business, advising on environmental law changes, over the course of her career Gill has developed expertise in public policy, environmental law, stakeholder management, governance and risk, environmental science and regulatory compliance and enforcement.

Gill was a board member at the Environment Agency for seven years until 2021 where she was chair of the Environment and Business Committee. She is currently the chair of Trustees at the Welcome Charity.

On joining the Board of Powerhouse Gill Weeks said: ““I am delighted to be joining Powerhouse Energy at an exciting time as it aims to become a global leader in technology solutions that transform plastics and waste into clean energy.  I look forward to bringing my expertise to the board and working with the Powerhouse team as it seeks to help the world transition to clean energy, whilst providing a solution to end-of-life plastic.”

James Greenstreet, Non-Executive Chairman of Powerhouse Energy Group, said: “We look forward to working with Gill whose appointment strengthens the Powerhouse board. Gill’s experience and expertise within waste, environment and resource management will undoubtedly help Powerhouse as it looks forward to delivering the UK’s first facility at Protos and see its technology rolled out internationally”. 

Keith is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers with 45 years of experience in energy, waste, and resources. Previous roles include Managing Director of Hampshire Waste Services Ltd and Managing Director of Veolia UK Ltd which grew to become the largest waste and resources company in the UK.

In 2012 Keith founded Vismundi Limited, a company advising on the recovery and management of resources. Along with other projects, Vismundi is advising Peel NRE Ltd on the development of their plastics-to-hydrogen project at Protos.

He has an extensive record of publications in technical and professional journals and was awarded the James Jackson Medal of the Chartered Institute of Wastes Management in 2005 for the paper ‘From Waste to Resource Management’, which laid the foundation for the move towards resource management in the UK and is still cited to this day. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement National Recycling Award in 2013.

Over your career, what have been the highlights to date?

I have always viewed my career as an adventure. It has been like following a path where you do not know where it will lead. I have never had a particular plan in mind. I have always been ambitious, but the mental conditioning of being on a journey has meant that I have never been frightened of challenges, nor taking responsibility, and have always been able to adapt to whatever life, fate or serendipity throws before me.
 
I have been fortunate to have had an interesting career. I worked for some blue-ribbon engineering companies and held senior management positions since my mid-twenties. I have travelled the world and been in some interesting and even adrenaline provoking situations. So in asking me what my highlights, the answer may not be what you expect.
 
I left university and joined Rolls Royce in Derby as a graduate trainee simply because my parents, who had suffered the disruption during their late teen and early working life of a world war, conditioned me into in opting for a career that they thought would be stable and always enable me to make a living. They were nearly right.
 
The first highlight of my career occurred at the end of my training period at Rolls-Royce in 1971, when it declared itself bankrupt. Working within a company that is declared bankrupt is a traumatic experience, and it is something I shall never forget – I could write pages about it. Being newly married with a mortgage and facing redundancy, it was hardly the stability my parents had encouraged me towards. I reacted immediately and found a job at Babcock as a Design Engineer and moved to London working on nuclear power stations, leaving my house in Derbyshire abandoned for over a year until I sold it for less than I paid for it – due to the economic shock suffered by the East Midlands from the loss of such a major employer.
 
I worked for Babcock for 15 years, during which time I was moved up to Scotland, back to London again, received several promotions, and ended my time with them as Chief Mechanical Engineer.  In terms of career highlights, I worked on many of the nuclear and fossil fuelled power stations on nuclear submarines, oil platforms, oil tankers and travelled around the world to Europe, the Far East and the Americas. I was stranded at sea twice (in the English Channel and the Caribbean), arrested by immigration police in the Virgin Islands, held captive in an office block in post-revolution Tehran – and there’s even more I could tell. Whilst being sometimes stressful and sometimes exciting, these experiences taught me not to be fazed by setbacks, to trust my own judgement and not to panic.
 
It was not much different with my subsequent employers.  As the result of an acquisition, I found myself back working for Rolls Royce as Engineering & Project Director, only to be despatched to Bahrain to manage a power station project construction, and eventually in the war zone of the first Gulf War. Having put the project into operation, repatriated all employees in the region, and declared “force majeure”, I flew out on the last flight out prior to the start of the land war. On returning to England, it was off to Orlando, Florida to negotiate the licence agreement with Westinghouse on their industrial turbines. Never a dull moment.
 
I then moved into the waste industry to Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE) – today known as Veolia. It was the early 1990s and a time when waste management in the UK was very basic. There were no recycling collections, the use of technology was minimal. I was fortunate, however, because within days a tender enquiry landed on my desk from Hampshire County Council that was seeking to move its waste management onto a sustainable platform. I could spend many hours talking about this, but what came out of it was something that created the foundation for waste management practice in the UK today and my claim to fame. CGE was based in France and at the time French thinking on waste was years ahead of the UK. We were able to take the French philosophy on recycling and recovery, anglicise it, and submit proposals that were well received by this forward-thinking county council. A partnership was formed between the company and the local authorities, including Portsmouth and Southampton, giving birth to probably the most successful development programme in the waste industry to date. Veolia still holds the contract to recycle and recover all the municipal waste in the Hampshire area, a relationship which is now over 30 years old and a value to Veolia that must be approaching £2 billion. Being at the forefront of something that changed so many people’s way of life was very satisfying and probably the greatest highlight for me.
 

What do you love about working within engineering?

Engineering is a profession that creates tangible things. It is therefore a very satisfying career as it is usually possible to see the product of your work. Speaking for myself, being an engineer has meant that I have been involved in many and varied things, have never been bored, never been without a job and it has given me a meal ticket around the world. Who can complain at that?

Are there any milestones within the commercialisation of PHE’s technology that you’re looking forward to seeing become reality?

Getting the first unit built. I want to see this thing working, and I will use my experience to the best of my ability to help it get there – and get there we will.

Look out for our next podcast which will feature Professor Joseph Howe from the University of Chester in conversation with Ian Crockford, Project Executive at Powerhouse Energy. News & Media – PowerHouse Energy Group PLC