Our trip to the waste incineration plant

On 25^th November 2010 some students from Bochum and the guest students from Wath and Barcelona went on a trip to the waste incineration plant in Essen Carnap, together with six teachers (Mrs Bunuel and Mr Garriga from Barcelona, Mrs Chisholm and Mr Minshull from Wath and Mrs Biehl and Mr Schönberg from our school).

The plant is a very special one, that produces energy (heat and electricity) from waste!

When we arrived, we entered a conference room, where Mr Schliesser, an important person of the RWE concern, welcomed our group.

While we had some drinks and heated up ourselves with hot coffee, Mr Schliesser showed us a presentation about the plant and its work.

First he gave us some general information, for example that the waste management scheme serves 1.2 million people in the Ruhr-area (Gladbeck, Bottrop, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, Mühlheim). That means, that the plant produces 1 kW of electricity per person per day 8.2 million people all in all 82 000 MW of electricity for everyone per day!!

We also learned something about the structure and the machines of the plant:

The highest part of the incineration plant is, obviously, the chimney. It is 200m high! There is also an electricity grind which is in charge for the northern part of Essen. The plant has also got a flue gas cleaning and an evaporating plant.

Overall, you would think that it is very loud for the people who live next to the plant. But the noise (135 dB) is insulated so strongly that the local residents hear almost anything.

Then it got a bit more difficult to follow the presentation, because we now talked about the more physical aspects of the incineration plant.

Here is some data:

- the plant has got a waste sorting concept: glass, glass recycling, paper, paper recycling, bio waste, composting, light packing, plastic recycling, gray bin, burned in plant.

- some values about the work area of the plant:

	inhabitants	area (km²)	waste input (MHKW)
Essen	572 624	210.36	275 780
Ruhr - area	1 196 270	452.99	606 527

- bottom waste bunker records 10 000 tonnes of rubbish.

- remainders and its disposal:

bottom ash (162 147t) sorting and screening

fly ash (15 426t) utilization

gypsum (1 660t) further processing possible

sludge (1 495t) hazardous waste

- gases that are released during the burning process:

component	unit	Limit value (17.BlmschV)	Ø 2009 (behind EmMa)
dust	mg/m³n	10	0.15
SO2	''	50	0.48
NOx	''	200	97.71
CO	''	50	8.74
C (org.)	''	10	0.57
HCI	''	10	0.14
NH3	mg/m³	5	0.02
Hg	mg/m³n	0.05	<0.005
CD,TI	''	0.05	<0.05
Σ other HM	''	0.5	<0.2
PCDD/F	mg/n³n	0.1	<0.05

These were the most important details about the incineration plant. We also inspected some of the machines and the operations there. We can just say, that the trip was very interesting and impressive. We were lucky that we had the chance to see this incineration plant.

But still: Even if waste is processed in a useful way here, it does not mean that we should produce more waste...

By Tabea and Svenja