A BUSINESSMAN on a mission to cut waste is designing what he intends to be Dorset’s most environmentally friendly trading estate.

Leon Linblad is the founder of CFA Trading, which overhauls ex-corporate computers and tablets, saving them from the scrap heap.

He owns the site where the business is based on Technology Road, Waterloo in Poole, and intends to develop it into an eco-friendly estate.

“I’d like to attract like-minded businesses people who’ve got a social conscience, creating an environmentally conscious trading estate,” he said.

“It will be the most environmentally friendly trading estate in Dorset. I would like it to be a carbon neutral estate.”

He hopes to start developing the site next year.

Plans include 12-14 warehouses with 250 solar panels on the roofs, along with a battery system for storing energy from the solar panels and a voltage regulator to make energy use more efficient.

Another 50kw solar panel system would be installed on the main warehouse.

There would be trees around the border of the site to help with reducing CO2, with communal and green picnic areas for staff.

The warehouses would be given efficient, carbon-neutral infrared heating if requested by tenants, and wall batteries would store electricity on existing buildings.

There would be bespoke recycling facility, solar powered and featuring a cardboard compactor, a plastic compactor and food waste compartment, used by all companies on the site.

Mr Linblad intends the site to store enough energy to take it off the power grid for periods of time.

“If you can take one estate off grid for a few hours, that makes a difference,” he said.

CFA Trading is set to turn over £7.5million a year from its work refurbishing computers. It says buying a refurbished PC or laptop over a new one saves 1,500 litres of water, 3,000kWh of electricity, 22kg of chemicals and 700kg of CO2.

The business was set up as a husband-and-wife operation, initially trading PCs and laptops from a spare room.

It acquired a warehouse two years later and scaled up rapidly, shifting to repairing and recycling and becoming an authorised Microsoft refurbisher in 2013.