REnescience: A New Technology with Global Ambitions
The Danish-based Dong Energy intends to finance, build and operate the world‘s first bio plant for handling unsorted household waste without prior treatment.
According to the Danish Company, the developed new technology, REnescience, is able to separate and sort household waste for recycling, by means of enzymes. It has been tested at a demonstration plant in Copenhagen since 2009.
“The new plant, the first commercial full-scale plant, will be built in Northwich near Manchester,” Dong Energy emphasized. It will have an annual capacity of 120,000 tons of waste, corresponding to the waste from almost 110,000 households. The input will be supplied by the UK waste management company FCC Environment, which already collects household garbage in the region. Dong Energy expects that the plant will be commissioned in early 2017.
The REnescience facility in Northwich will be able to convert the household waste, among other things, into a considerable amount of biogas as well as recyclable plastics and metals, the Danish provider stresses. The biogas would be converted to green power via gas engines. In April this year, the Danish company has sent a mobile REnescience plant to Malaysia to test whether the country offers a new export market for the technology. In the presence of the Danish Minister for Environment and Food, Esben Lunde Larsen, Dong Energy had entered into a cooperation agreement with Cenviro, one of Malaysia‘s largest players within waste management. The parties will now test this technology in a Malaysian context. In the opinion of Dong Energy’s management Malaysia is a very interesting market for the REnescience technology, as there is a growing need for exploiting the resources in the increasing waste volumes. Today, the majority of Malaysian waste ends up in landfill sites and none of the resources are utilized. At the same time, waste volumes are going up – in Malaysia and worldwide. According to the World Bank, waste volumes worldwide will have increased by 70 percent by 2025 compared to 2012.
Dong Energy is planning to send the mobile plant to other Asian countries to test whether there is an export market for it.
Grafic: Dong Energy
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