SYMOVE, the waste authority for the west of the Oise department of northern France, has awarded Veolia Environmental Services, the contract to finance, build and operate its recovery center for household and assimilated waste in the town of Villers-Saint-Sépulcre, near Beauvais. The new site is scheduled to come into service in March 2014.
The multi-process center will have a treatment capacity of 130,000 metric tons and will include a mechanical waste sorting plant, a thermal waste-to-energy plant and an anaerobic digestion plant. It has been designed to improve the links between the different treatment units.
The sorting plant will separate out waste suitable for materials recovery, fermentable waste for organic recovery, and waste to be incinerated for energy recovery.
The thermal waste-to-energy plant will generate an annual 72,000 MWh of electricity. This will satisfy the treatment center's own energy needs and enable the sale of 58,000 MWh of electricity per year. This is the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 20,000 households.
The organic recovery plant will treat 20,000 metric tons of waste per year using anaerobic digestion to recover the waste in the form of energy and a product for use in agriculture. This process produces biogas (over 55% methane) that is then converted into electricity using cogeneration (two million cubic meters producing 4,000 MWh), and a digestate. This is composted and refined to produce an organic soil conditioner that complies with current regulations.
To build this multi-process treatment center, which combines materials, organic and energy recovery processes, Veolia Environmental Services has set up a dedicated company that will be majority owned by its subsidiary Valnor along with AE&E Inova France, a leading company in the construction of thermal waste-to-energy facilities.