Work soon to begin on UK waste management plant

In the UK, AmeyCespa, North Yorkshire County Council and the City of York Council, have signed a contract to design, build and operate a new integrated waste management facility – Allerton Waste Recovery Park.

The facility will include a recycling plant, an anaerobic digestion plant and a waste-to-energy plant for the treatment of residual household waste.

Anaerobic digestion company OWS was selected by Amey Cespa to supply the AD plant, including its patented Dranco technology, to the site. This is OWS's first order in the UK for its patented Dranco dry digestion technology.

The Dranco technology is able to handle contaminated organic fractions from mixed household waste, containing significant amounts of sand, glass and stones. It allows operation with no or very little addition of water so that the digestate can be easily burnt together with the non-recyclable waste.

The digestate will have a dry matter of 35% solids and can be pumped as such to the waste-to-energy plant for co-incineration. Other digestion technologies would require drying or dewatering of the digestate prior to mixing it with the non-recyclable fraction before incineration.

'The order for us amounts to €15.2 million and comprises a Dranco digestion unit for the treatment of 40,000 tonnes per year of organic waste. Our scope of delivery includes a large digester, a gas storage, a flare, and biogas engines with a capacity of around 1.8MW,' says Luc De Baere, MD of OWS.

Construction of Allerton Waste Recovery Park is expected to begin in December 2014 and take approximately 36 months to complete. It will become fully operational during 2018. Once completed, the facility is expected to process around 320,000 tonnes of household and some commercial waste annually. It will also generate renewable electricity to power the equivalent of over 40,000 homes.