New Gemidan Facility with food waste substrate that is near 100% free from non-organic contamination
Gemidan, whose highly innovative ECOGI technology processes food waste into a high-quality pulp-based substrate for conversion into renewable energy, has opened its second pre-treatment facility.
Sitting adjacent to a thermal energy-from-waste plant, the new facility in Frederikshavn, Denmark, has a processing capacity of 50,000 tonnes and produces a substrate for anaerobic digestion (AD) biogas plants that in terms of plastic contamination is at least three times freer from plastic than the already very stringent Danish regulations require.
Rune Nyhuss, director of Gemidan Group, commented, “The benefits to the world biogas industry of this ultra-pure, pre-treatment technology are huge. As any AD operator will tell you, grit from feedstock is an ongoing burden to performance, maintenance and efficiency – with downtime a major headache. At Gemidan we have been perfecting our ECOGI technology for over five years – and this new facility in Frederikshavn will have far-reaching bottom-line gains, as well as conserving water and preventing plastics from polluting farmland”.
Nyhuss went on to explain that more than half of the water required for ECOGI to process food waste is from 5,500m3 of harvested rainwater, which will be stored in a lagoon and treated by special separators to remove any grit or sand.
He added, mentioning the substrate being 99.96%-free of non-organic physical contamination, “Feedstock for the new facility will come from source-separated household, industry and local business food waste. Inevitably, there will be plastics, glass and metals to contend with, but intensive independent testing during the five-year development of ECOGI has proved that we achieve a substrate that is near 100%-free from non-organic physical contamination. Together with the ongoing success of our first plant in Holsted, Denmark, this is a major breakthrough”.
