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With our more than 110 employees in whole Taiwan, we are accepting resource recyclables and waste all the way from Kaohsiung to Taipei. In addition to our head office in Taipei, we serve customers from all regions in our plastic recycling plant in Nantou and our industrial service plant in Taoyuan.
The REMONDIS Group’s locations
Discover the world of REMONDIS with its approx. 900 branches and associated companies in over 30 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.
Producing SRF since 2003 – and still running!
The Taiwanese SRF market is developing rapidly these years, but this country has yet to see its first big plant in operation. We can’t wait until that day finally comes. Meanwhile in Germany, the SRF market already took off back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s with the implementation of the TaSi regulation, which mandated the pre-treatment of household waste before being sent to landfill sites to minimize the organic content in them.
The REMONDIS mechanical biological treatment (MBT) plant in Erftstadt is a great example of our long-term and successful experience with the SRF business in Europe. Today, we want to introduce to you our SRF plant in Erftstadt and focus on the fact that a long-term successful operation of SRF plants is possible but requires deep experience like which REMONDIS has gathered over the years.
The SRF Plant’s History
In 1993, the German government decided that it is necessary to separate the organic waste from the household waste as much as possible to avoid methane and other emissions in the landfill sites after the municipal solid waste (MSW) is dumped there. The German government gave the market from 1993 to 2005 to develop the right technologies for this goal. First, everyone thought that incineration might be a good solution to pre-treat the MSW. But it was soon clear that the treatment cost of 150-250 EUR/t for MSW incineration at that time would be too expensive, so MBT technologies were developed.
That was the time when the MBT plant in Erftstadt – among many others – was born. As of today, there are 46 MBT plants in Germany, most of them built between 2001 and 2005. The installed treatment capacity of these plants is ca. 6 million tons per year. Out of these SRF plants, there is an output of ca. 2.4 million tons of SRF, 160,000 tons of scrap and 20,000 tons of plastics every year. That leads to a CO2 reduction of ca. 3 million tons per year.
How to produce SRF?
In general, the production of SRF always focuses on the separation of incombustibles, low-calorific value materials, and harmful substances from the waste stream. What remains after the separation is a high-calorific value fuel without harmful substances which is then supplied to the energy industry (cement kilns, power plants, boilers). It depends on specific content of the waste input to know how much and what quality of SRF can be produced from that waste stream.
In the graph above is an example of MSW in Germany. As seen, we can recover at least 40% of SRF-worthy material. Another 39% is combustible but not suitable for SRF production so it is sent to incineration plants. Among all these combustibles, it is important to notice that the biogenic content is around 66%. That means the combustion of this share does not release any additional carbon in the environment as plants have usually stored equally as much carbon during their lifetime as released when combusted. MSW is therefore an excellent source of fuel with high biogenic content for power plants and boilers to reduce their carbon footprint.
At this moment, it is important to understand the differences in SRF production plant designs. In general, we can separate them into MBT (mechanical biological treatment) and MT (mechanical treatment) plants. As the name suggests, the MBT plant includes a biological treatment step, for example rotting or composting and biogas, while the MT plant only includes a mechanical treatment of the wastes.
The MBT process can be described simply as follows:
For the MT process, the 4th step in the graph above can simply be taken out. But that is only recommended if the waste input for producing SRF is low in organics.
The key in the whole process lies in the know-how of how to separate the high calorific and SRF-worthy material from the rest. REMONDIS has built up long-term experience in how to do it even from the most complex types of waste e.g., household waste.
Additionally, as the operator of SRF production plants, we are responsible for producing stable and acceptable quality products for our customers especially in regard to chlorine and heavy metal content. When receiving mixed waste like household waste, we must process the material carefully to detect especially chlorine streams within and separate them.
The SRF of REMONDIS
It was clear before the construction of the MBT plant started that it was important to define customer demand for the fuel output. As not all boilers or power plants use the same combustion technology or have the same flue gas treatment, the fuel needed to stay flexible in quality parameters. The REMONDIS Erftstadt MBT plant was designed to produce 3 different types of products going into different industries with differing quality and heat value demands.
Most of the SRF was inked in a strategic deal with one of the largest energy providers, RWE in its coal-fired power plant in nearby Berrenrath. There, an extra feed-in system for the SRF into the power plant was designed with the help of REMONDIS. At least 40,000 t/a of the quality-controlled SRF are delivered to RWE. More than 10,000 t/a are delivered into the German cement industry and the rest is delivered to individual customers.
The graphic below shows the different fuel products and their main criteria:
The BGS & SRF standards
When talking about stable quality, we would like to emphasize the importance of the Bundesgütegemeinschaft Sekundärrohstoffe e.V. (BGS). The BGS is a German association which, as a third party, is responsible for the quality control and certification of SRF in Germany.
The BGS was founded in 1999 with the aim to promote the production and usage of quality-assured solid recovered fuels (SRF) to reduce CO2 emissions. At that time, same as in Taiwan now, the industrial boilers and power plants didn’t know much about fuels produced from waste and were skeptical of what impacts this could have on their combustion processes. And rightly so since no one has ever done it before. So why leave the boiler operators hanging instead of starting an open communication about the pros and cons of burning SRF instead of coal? Thus, the BGS was born.
The BGS consists of industrial companies (waste industry, cement industry, plastic industry, etc.), and academia which developed the quality assurance program for SRF in Germany. Based on standardized sample taking and process requirements for SRF plants who want to receive the certificate, samples are taken from the SRF plants in fixed intervals. These samples are analyzed based on existing standards. If the SRF meets these standards, the BGS issues a certificate for the SRF plant which can then be used to negotiate with the boiler or power plant downstream who wishes to burn SRF. The boiler or power plant can be assured that the SRF is meeting the criteria defined by the standard and the government. This creates trust and control in a market which is defined by highly heterogenous waste input streams.
The development of this certificate / license was one of the smartest moves in the development of the whole SRF market because there is a need for a trustworthy third party which can assure stable quality of the fuel. Furthermore, it can be used as a platform for industrial companies to communicate their recommendations for regulation or law improvements to the government. As this not only resembles one single company opinion but rather the whole industry opinion. If you are interested in knowing the details of the German SRF standard and its parameters, you can contact us here. We will happily provide you with some more documents to introduce the details.
CO2 reduction & KlimaExpo
In 2017, REMONDIS was awarded the Klima-Expo award by the government of Northrhine-Westphalia for their contribution to a sustainable circular economy and energy industry.
With our MBT plant in Erftstadt, we are helping the nearby energy industry to successfully reduce their carbon footprint by replacing their coal with our SRF. It has been proven at this location, that 1 ton of SRF used to substitute coal can reduce at least 1 ton of CO2. Go check out this post from our blog to learn more about the CO2 reduction potential from SRF.
Between 2005 and 2016, the REMONDIS MBT Erftstadt delivered ca. 850,000 tons of SRF to the nearby RWE coal power plant. By that, at least 75,000 tons of CO2 could be reduced per year for the coal power plant. A perfect example for how the waste management / recycling industry can help the energy industry reach the turnaround to a more sustainable future.
Conclusion
After more than 20 years of experience in the field of SRF production, we at REMONDIS, are proud to say that we made it through the beginnings all the way into a mature market.
We know that even the most difficult waste streams like MSW (they can contain literally everything) can be successfully converted into SRF by applying strict rules and standards both in input quality control, production process, and output quality control. The table below gives an idea about the success factors of operating a SRF plant successfully long-term.
When applying all these factors, the production and application of SRF can play a crucial role in guiding the world’s energy industry to a more sustainable way and at the same time reducing the waste / resources from being simply incinerated. We believe that SRF is an important puzzle piece in our carbon reduction efforts and should be regarded as such by governments around the world. Government regulations should mirror this by, for example, prioritizing the conversion of combustible waste into SRF rather than being incinerated. Furthermore, chlorine limits in the cement product standards must match the realistic contents in the waste inputs if the cement industry should play a role in accepting the SRF produced.
Many things must play together, but Germany has proven that SRF is a successful concept to reduce carbon footprints and incinerated and landfilled waste volumes.
We at REMONDIS Taiwan are happy to talk more about this topic with you. If you would either like to develop the right policies or regulations to develop the market, or simply develop projects in that field. Just reach out to our business development team and we can share more with you!
