During the second to last week of March, ECN’s policy officer Riccardo Gambini went on a study trip to visit Flemish and Dutch plants and familiarize himself with the ‘work on the field’, observing first-hand how biowaste is recycled in composting and anaerobic digestion plants.
The first stop was the Ecowerf facility in Leuven, whose AD and composting sites were recently renewed. He took part in an auditing carried out by VLACO and got insights on the whole recycling process leading to the end product. In the following days, he continued the study tour in the Netherlands where he was joined by Avfall Norge and visited different plants with the organisational support of BVOR. The first site on the agenda was Meerlanden, equipped with both composting and anaerobic digestion infrastructures and owned by 8 surrounding municipalities. One of Meerlanden key missions is to recover all possible materials and energy from biowaste processing, and to do that they have developed an integrated system where they also try to repurpose some of the byproducts from the recycling process. The last leg scheduled was one of den Ouden’s green waste composting plants. The site is located close to the family company offices, and uses windrow composting to produce compost, including a specific quality of certified compost for growing media.