Dive Brief:
- Cheshire, England is about a year away from launching the world's first biogas plant to manage unsorted and untreated residential waste — a project to be financed, built, and run by wind power and oil and gas exploration company DONG Energy.
- UK trash collector FCC Environment has been commissioned as the facility's lead supplier. With an annual capacity of 120,000 tons, the plant will receive waste from 110,000 households.
- Branded as "REnescience," the new WTE technology leverages heat and water, then mixes the waste with enzymes enabling it to be sorted, with plastics, metals, and other materials separated for further processing. Other waste such as textiles and foils are converted to heat sources through incineration. The resulting bioliquid is then processed to make biogas and refined into green gas for fuel and recycling.
Dive Insight:
The UK has been pinpointed as a region that has a way to go for a solid footing on the waste-to-energy front. But the region has made some strides, including previous experiments leveraging biogas with innovations like a "Bio Bus,"powered by organic waste, with gas from a sewage treatment plant. And just before DONG’s announcement of this newest biogas project, Denmark’s Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises subsidiary was just awarded over $90 million to design, manufacture, and build a WTE plant in Gloucestershire.
Biogas specifically has the potential to leverage a natural waste treatment process while leaving a smaller footprint than some waste management alternatives.
DONG’s chairman Brent Cheshire said in a press release that the plant represents the company’s commitment to "investing in the Northern Powerhouse," further commenting, "REnescience is a brilliant new technology and generates as many resources as possible from everyday household waste. This new bio plant will see us handling waste in a much smarter way."
