A New Road to Energy Recovery

Energy from the combustion of non-recyclable waste can be used to produce electric power and supply district heating networks.
Energy recovery thus helps conserve fossil fuels, hold down greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the amount of residual waste landfilled.

Veolia Environmental Services applies the standards established by European regulations, which set the emission limit values for flue gases, to all of our energy recovery facilities.

Veolia Environmental Services offers clients top-performing technical and environmental solutions. An example is the first waste Public-Private Partnership (PPP) signed in France by Veolia Environmental Services and Syndicat Mixte de Traitement des Déchets Ménagers, an intermunicipal syndicate for household waste.

Under this PPP, an exemplary job was done of upgrading the Antibes waste-to-energy plant on the Mediterranean coast, without halting the operation of the plant, now a benchmark for environmental performance.

Actions to reduce and avoid greenhouse gas emissions are being implemented throughout our activities. In the energy recovery facilities operated by Veolia Environmental Services, this results in the following actions:

• Substitute energy produced from fossil fuels by thermal energy and electricity from waste combustion.
  5,231 kt of waste have been incinerated in waste to energy plants.
• Recover metals and bottom ashes from incineration.
  106 kt of metals and nearly 883 kt of bottom ash have been recovered after incineration.
• Develop research programs on CO₂ capture and storage recovery from flue gas.

In 2007, the two waste to energy facilities, Shanghai Jiangqiao and Guangzhou Likeng, operated by Veolia Environmental Services in China, ranked respectively at the first and fifth place of the «Top 10 Bluesky Ranking of the Waste Incineration Power Plants », organised by the United Nations and China's National Development and Reform Commission.