Hot goods: An EEW employee uses a crane to transport waste to be burned in a waste incineration plant, which uses the waste to generate valuable energy in the form of electricity and district heating.
Image: Picture Alliance
Waste-to-energy plants are a safe bet in the gas crisis. The largest German operating company belongs to the city of Beijing. Investments of 900 million euros are planned by the end of 2024 to tackle future projects.
An the huge mountain of rubbish, it is hardly noticeable that a new truckload has arrived. The crane driver, well shielded from dust and stench behind a thick pane of glass, is quickly done with it. Two or three times he drops the heavy gripper into the freshly delivered supplies and pulls up the indefinable jumble of plastic parts, pipes, rags and foils in order to let it rain across a wide area back into the storage bunker. The next station is the large funnel on the chute that transports the material to the grate of the waste incineration plant.
Dozens of trucks cart around 1,300 tons of waste on an average day. In some cases, it is brought in over long distances, the catchment area goes as far as Baden-Württemberg. “What arrives here is material with different calorific values. That’s why we first have to mix it well so that it burns optimally,” explains operations manager Dirk Böhme. “Power plant manager” is on his business card, because the plant in the Knapsack industrial park near Cologne is not only intended to remove the waste, but also to extract as much energy as possible.
