The company has signed a deal with waste management firm FCC to process up to 200,000 tonnes-a-year of RDF from British household, commercial and industrial waste at Twences EfW plant in Hengelo in the Netherlands. The RDF will be sealed in air-tight plastic bales of more than one tonnes in weight each.
A spokesman for Twence said the RDF would come from several FCC sites in the Midlands and the South East of England.
FCC currently produces RDF at Costessey, Norfolk and Kirkless, Wigan. A further plant is being commissioned in Alfreton and another facility will be developed in Bletchley where Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF) will be produced. It remains unclear whether an RDF plant will be developed at FCC’s site in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire.
The agreement with FCC, a subsidiary of Spanish construction and services giant FCC, is Twence’s second British contract, following last year’s deal to burn RDF from Middlesex-based waste management firm Senecas dirty MRF in Wembley (see letsrecycle.com story).
Twence chief executive, Paul de Jong, said: Internationalisation is a focal point of Twence’s strategy. After all, waste is no longer merely a national issue but has firmly become a matter of European business. It reinforces the basis for the continuity of our company. The contract with FCC Environment will strengthen our international market position considerably. At the same time, our involvement in the recovery of raw materials in the UK is increasing as well.
Permanent presence
Gert Jan Bennink, Twence marketing and sales manager, said that Twence was now hoping to build up a permanent presence in the UK market.
He said: Our goal is to gradually expand our share of the market for RDF in the UK. We don’t see this as a temporary activity. We want to achieve a permanent position in the market there. Twence and its associate Attero are working together in the British market under the name of Dutch Recycling and have already managed to build up a good reputation there. In September, Dutch Recycling will once again be taking part in RWM, the international trade fair for waste management in Birmingham.
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Data compiled by the Environment Agency this month (February 14) revealed that most of the RDF exported from the UK in 2012 went to the Netherlands. The UK exported 892,900 tonnes of the material throughout the year, of which 690,000 tonnes went to the Netherlands (see letsrecycle.com story).
Writing on letsrecycle.com in 2012, Mr de Jong said that the Netherlands had a higher EfW incineration capacity than the UK but that the amount of municipal waste from which to process the RDF in the country was falling.
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