AmbienDura

On 11th October 2007 the Dutch organic waste managers section of the Dutch Waste Management Association (DWMA) Vereniging Afvalbedrijven visited the LIPOR organic waste management centre just outside Porto (the `capital´ of the north of Portugal and the country’s second biggest city). AmbienDura was invited to give a presentation on the current policy context of these debates – namely Portuguese organic waste management policies and relevant European waste policy developments.

LIPOR is the waste management authority that manages PORTO´s waste. Its organic waste management centre, built beside the old (now closed and re-landscaped) city landfill, is part of a bigger complex that includes a composting plant, water cooling lakes (including a built in water fall), a recyclables sorting and baling plant, administrative offices (serving also the LIPOR incinerator – which is located at another site), a fully equipped auditorium and a `demo´ garden where visitors (mostly schools) can see several examples of the uses and benefits of composting and learn about activities such as home-composting.
The LIPOR composting plant is a fully automated, state of the art tunnel-composting plant using Dutch technology by GICOM. The plant has a capacity to process (input) 60,000 tonnes waste/year but is currently only operating at partial capacity. The compost produced is suitable for high quality agricultural applications and experiments are being run to asses how to provide a palletised product for easy application by farm machinery. The biowaste input comes entirely from source separated household kitchen waste, park and cemetery green waste and fermentable wastes from the retail sector (fruit and vegetable markets) and the HORECA (restaurants and catering) sector. However, the source separated household waste collection is temporarily suspended. The pilot phase had some obstacles with motivating people to adapt their habits to the use of bio-bins. The bio-bins were provided to deliver the kitchen biowaste to the larger municipal street bins. The tendency to drop of the waste (in bags) on the way out of the house to work means that the use of bio-bags instead of bio-bins is now being considered as an alternative.

The visit included not only a technical `site visit´ but also a series of exchanges on the EU, Portuguese and Dutch waste policies, including the progress of the development of the end-of-waste standard for compost by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The presentations also covered the state of play of the Portuguese and Dutch experience with composting and organic waste management.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 11:29 and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.