B1-Summary description of the project
Contents
(Max. 3 pages; to be completeddiscuss in English)
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Project title:
Project objectives and key messages:
With a view to breaking the link between growth and waste generation, the European Union has provided itself with a legal framework aimed at the whole waste cycle from generation to disposal, placing the emphasis on recovery and recycling.
The Waste Framework Directive sets the long-term strategy aims to help Europe become a recycling society that seeks to avoid waste and uses waste as a resource, in accordance with smart and sustainable development targets set by Europa 2020.
The Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, under the Water Framework Directive, and a future Sludge Directive now under discussion, regards producers of sewage sludge.
Treatment routes and use of sewage sludge is very similar to that of biowaste.
Waste streams such as sewage sludge (SS) and the organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW) are underexploited feedstock for bioenergy, withdrawing valuable resources irrevocably from economic and natural cycles.
Anaerobic codigestion can be considered one of the most promising way to give a proper disposal to the organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW) coming from source or separate collection systems.
The two flows of OFMSW and SS may converge into anaerobic co-digestion for the production of biogas.
In Europe there are more than 35000 facilities that already use anaerobic fermentation for stabilizing sewage sludge. Because of the composition of SS these plants in most case just use the low quantity, low quality biogas obtained for maintaining process heat sending the remaining to flare-torch. This is impressive European asset can be upgraded to co-digestion to produce heat and power if there is sufficient quantity and quality of inflow material.
OFMSW coming from separate collection may secure the required additional supply of biodegradable matter.
While, municipalities are interested in keeping collection and treatment costs low, biogas plants are only able to treat OFMSW with low plastics contamination. As a result OFMSW is often sent to composting.
In order to solve this drawback to widespread upgrading of existing SS treatment facilities, COWS project partners Sea Risorse, Sea Ambiente and the Municipality of Viareggio devised an innovative processing solution that experimented at low-scale, achieving positive results.
That solution is now brought to demonstration scale with the whole innovation model.
A high quality for the OFMSW that is supplied to a biogas plant can be achieved by two main concepts: either by establishing a source-sorting collection system that achieves a low content of contaminants or by selective removal of contamination from the collected OFMSW before it is supplied to the biogas plant.
However, this separation has to be very efficient to ensure a high purity of the waste on both flows (the wet flow being mixed to digester and
Earlier experiences have shown that compost derived from mechanical separation hardly meet the required standards for useful application as soil conditioner.
