Netherlands

Today, the European Landfill Association (ELA) that represents European landfill operators was founded in Cologne.

‘The safety of workers is compromised, the damage to plant runs into millions’

The Green Deal between the industry association Koffie & Thee Nederland, the Dutch government and the Dutch Waste Management Association (DWMA) was named winner of the Recycling Heroes 2023 award at the Global Recycling Day on Saturday 18 March. The separate collection of coffee pads and tea bags in food and garden waste in the Netherlands will generate about 88 million kilograms of additional compost each year.

Nomination for the Recycling Heroes 2023 award

"Sustainable Waste Management: The Forefront of Innovation" was the topic under which Prof. Marco Castaldi's organising team gathered a wide range of presentations from around the world:

Over the last few years, global energy demand has risen, and this trend is expected to continue. Almost all European Union (EU) countries are suffering from a shortage of energy services. Annually, EU fossil fuel energy production falls; for example, in 2014, gas production fell by 11.2% compared to 2013. Energy imports, especially natural gas, have increased as a result of lower energy output. The EU is still heavily reliant on fossil fuel imports (oil and gas), and the cost of EU energy imports in 2017 increased by 26% (€266 billion).

Hospital and medical wastes are disposed in tens of thousands of dedicated incinerators or are autoclaved to destroy pathogens and then landfilled. However, over a hundred cities which have waste to energy (WTE) power plants fueled by municipal solid waste, use these plants to co-combust medical wastes. This report identified forty one such plants, located in a dozen nations, which in total co-combust about 90,000 tons of medical waste annually. The medical waste represented an average of 2.4% of the total amount of wastes combusted in these WTE power plants. Generally, the medical wastes are collected at the point of origin in puncture resistant, leakproof and sealed containers which are transported to WTE plants and are mechanically conveyed to the WTE furnace.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, one of BIR’s key aims has been to seek out regular virus-related updates from around the world and to disseminate relevant information to the recycling industry. To this end, BIR asked for latest feedback during a virtual meeting of national association members on Friday May 15, of which the following is a summary.

This Outlook can help decision-makers understand the direction in which we are heading and help to assess which policies can support a more circular economy. The OECD stands ready to assist governments in making this transition by designing, developing and delivering better resource efficiency policies for better lives.

‘The safety of workers is compromised, the damage to plant runs into millions’

18 Member States are at risk of missing one or both of the 2025 targets.

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.

In 2012 the Dutch Waste-to-Energy sector agreed upon a Green Deal with the government to either clean the Municipal Solid Waste Incinerator (MSWI) bottom ash stemming from Waste-to-Energy, or find other applications for it rather than the IBC application in embankments (closed application; IBC = isolation, management and control). As a member of the Dutch Waste Management Association, N.V. HVC was one of the companies that signed this Green deal and committed to the goal stated therein.

In April 2014 Van der Hoeff Refractories (VDHR), a continuation of a Benelux-based refractory company, developed its own boiler tile system. Due to ongoing service contracts with our own customer base, the practical use of the state-of-the-art system was implemented immediately. From past experience, there have been concepts for refractory tube wall protection available in the market, but none of them fully comply with the requirements of a state-of-the-art concept:

Waste Management International - Impressions over the past few years, send to us by ForumZ Partners!

An important remaining issue of the standard sensor sorters based on air jets (blow bars) or mechanical actuators to remove the selected particles from a stream is that there exists a conflict between the recovery rate and the grade of the recovered product, when sorting small, say mm-sized materials.

6^th IBBA workshop on the topic of biogas branding

New book on modern WTE technology and some of its applications around the world by Dr. Efstatios Kalogirou, member of the Global WtERT Council and co-founder of WtERT-Greece. It discusses thermal treatment technologies, including combustion, novel gasification, plasma gasification, and pyrolysis. Furthermore it offers 35 real-world international case studies from the Americas, Asia, Europe, as well as Africa and provides different approaches for different geographic areas.

Rivers annually emit between 1.15 and 2.41 million metric tons of plastic to the oceans.

Combustion with energy recovery of post-recycling municipal solid waste (MSW) plays an important role in sustainable waste management worldwide. The main by-product of MSW combustion is the ash discharged at the end of the moving grate, which has significant resource potential, since it mainly consists of ferrous, non-ferrous metals and mineral aggregates.

Donors include Silicon Valley philanthropists Marc & Lynne Benioff, as well as Peter Thiel and other supporters.

This Study to assess the implementation by EU Member States of certain provisions of Directive 1999/31/EC on the landfill of waste, carried out for the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Environment (DG Environment), investigates the situation in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU) as regards the landfilling of untreated non-hazardous municipal solid waste.

Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a sensor technique that utilizes a pulsed laser beam. The laser ablates a small amount of material on the surface of a sample and breaks it down into excited atoms and ions to form a plasma. A spectrometer is used to record the emission spectrum of this plasma, which can provide both qualitative and quantitative information on the elemental composition of the ablated material.

Separate collection of organics is a key part of schemes to achieve highest rates of recovery of materials. Also, it allows recovery of clean organic resources, which are then suitable for application onto farmlands, thereby causing multiple beneficial effects as - locking C in soils (which helps tackling climate change) - fighting desertification and erosion - reducing use of mineral fertilisers (and eutrophication that may occur in sensitive areas and wetlands) - preventing pathogens thanks to the suppressive power (which reduces use of pesticides), etc.

The objective of the article is to analyse the use of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) in public risk assessment and risk management organisations in France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada and the United States based on more than a hundred interviews conducted with social sciences experts employed by or working for these organisations. If the added value brought by the integration of social scientists is recognised, the use of social sciences differs from one organisation to another. The article compares the different positions given to social scientists inside and outside the organisation, the various methods used and the different contents produced. The survey highlights a set of initiatives that are scattered, differentiated and ultimately have little in common - except that they often play a marginal role in the main activities of the agencies concerned.