Current state of Waste Management >>>

Today, the Meseberg Climate Working Group met in Berlin. It is the second meeting of the Franco-German group, bringing together all ministries dealing with climate change measures under the lead of Climate State Secretaries Brune Poirson (FRA) and Jochen Flasbarth (DEU). The close collaboration across sectors responds to the mandate given by President Macron and Chancellor Merkel in June 2018 at Meseberg.

A report by Ecologic Institute and Climact shows that the draft National Energy and Climate Plans presented by governments at the start of 2019 are in acute need of improvement. They suffer from inadequate targets and insufficient details on the policies and financing needed to move towards net-zero emission economies in Europe. Member States also need to do better in involving their national stakeholders in providing input to the plans, to benefit from their expertise and to get them on board for future policies. Good practice examples exist around the EU to serve as inspiration for the final plans due by the end of the year.

Together with Mr. Thomas Schwarz (photo), Managing Director of Zweckverband Waste Management Region Hannover (aha) Werner Bauer and Dr. Karoline Borner, WtERT-Germany had the pleasure to visit the impressive photography exhibition "Ctrl-X, A topography of e-waste" of documentary photographer Kai Löffelbein in Hanover.

As a completion of the intensive cooperation of the export initiative Environmental Technologies "Sustainable Waste and Recycling Management in Croatia", a high-ranking 30-member delegation from Croatia visited Bavaria.

Dr. Sunil Kumar, Principal Scientist and Head, Head of WtERT India had a meeting with Dipl.-Ing. Werner Bauer and Dipl.-Ing. Hedwig Vielreicher in Munich, Bavaria.

A tunisian delegation came to Munich during 26 ^th- 30 ^th of November 2018. They visited the technical site at municipal utilities, city of Rosenheim, as well as BSA GmbH to take a look at construction waste recycling, bio waste fermentation and recycling of electronic waste. To round off the program, a workshop with contributions from Tunisian and Bavarian experts took place.

Emission reduction in power plants.

The EU-Reference Document for emissions control under the European Union‘s Directive 2010/75/EU at Large Combustion Plants (LCP – i.e at coal-fired power plants – was finalized in 2017, establishing Prof. Vosteen‘s Bromine-Enhanced-Mercury-Oxidation (BEMO-technology) as a BAT. In April 2018, the corresponding Waste Incineration BREF has undergone its final revisions by the Technical Working Group, coordinated by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission’s Science and Knowledge Service in Seville; for mercury emissions control at Waste Incineration Plants (WIP) the BEMO-technology was established as a BAT, as well. The following paper will report about applications of the technology at divers WIP in Germany (since 2001) and in France (since 2014). A special issue are mercury emission peaks as caused by unforeseen (sometimes criminal) input of hidden mercury; also this problem can be handled easily, as will be described again below.

Dr. Goran Rozing, Ferit and Werner Bauer, WtERT have decided to collaborate on future projects in Croatia.

The UNEP Minamata Agreement of 2013 has set itself the goal of reducing mercury emissions worldwide. The name comes from incidents in Minamata, Japan, where in the 1950s, about 3,000 people died of mercury poisoning due to the discharge of mercury-containing wastewater into the sea.

Sewage sludge treatment routes are mostly well established in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. While there are different approaches, the problem or task of processing and handling sewage sludge is widely considered solved. So why is this a trending topic?

In Europe the arising sewage sludge is treated or reused in different ways. Whereas a quarter of the sludge is used as fertilizer in agriculture, more than one third is thermally treated in power plants (Figure 1). The thermal treatment is performed in mono combustion plants or in conventional power plants (e.g. lignite or hard coal fired power plants) in form of co-firing. Here, co-firing plays a considerable role. In Germany, 33.3 % of the sewage sludge is used for co-firing in conventional power plants, whereas 27.7 % of the sewage sludge is incinerated in mono combustion plants.

The experiences gained during the last decades with fouling and corrosion in power plants fired with difficult fuels like waste derived from household and/or industry strongly influence the design of the boilers and the materials used. It is a lessons learned situation, at least for fuels dominated by household derived waste. Conservative steam parameters as well as high quality and high performance materials are commonly accepted as necessary.

Following the introduction of Industrial Emission Directive (IED) in 2010, the position of WI-BREF with regard to the approval of new plants and also the continued operation of existing plants changed considerably. With the IED it was stipulated that ...

Today, SNCR (Selective Non Catalytic Reduction) Technology is a well proven technology to meet even very challenging NO_x reduction requirements. Continuous developments of the reduction agent injection system, online temperature measurement systems as well as improved automation concepts have increased the SNCR NO_x control efficiency as well as its flexibility and reliability.