Waste & Metal Recycling
Australian Waste & Recycling Expo
OVERVIEW
An eight hectare, modern, integrated waste treatment centre, the park receives and treats material from all La Rioja municipalities. Tratamiento de Residuos La Rioja SL (Valoriza Servicios Medioambientales), the company that has managed the sites since 2009, remodeled the center’s facilities significantly three years ago, with a view to creating one of Spain’s most technologically advanced plants.
The park has the capacity to treat 130,000 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW), 10,000 tons of packaging, 3,000 tons of bulk waste and 5,000 tons of garden clippings and pruning waste each year. It recovers as much organic material from the inert waste as possible, reducing biodegradable content sent to landfill to a minimum. It then transforms the organic material into energy and compost through biomethanisation, carried out in digesters. The site currently produces 10,000 MW of electricity, entirely fed back into the power grid, and 7,000 tons of compost a year.
OBJECTIVES
SITUATION
The X-TRACT 1200 unit is a waste sorting system using the most advanced sensors on the market. These, with its high production capacity and short amortisation period, make the unit the most advanced and profitable available. Thanks to its X-ray technology, the system is able to identify materials regardless of their surface and separate substances according to atomic density. Its X-ray camera has a 0.8mm resolution, allowing it to detect and separate extremely small fractions of inert materials. The result is fast, efficient production of a highly pure, organic fraction, over 90% free of inert materials. Calculations by TOMRA, based on knowledge of how the x-tract unit has performed in diverse trials, have shown increases in biogas and electrical energy production of around 20%, compared to levels achievable before its development.
TOMRA Sorting’s separation systems are integrated and can be adapted to any existing facility, as is the case at the Eco-Park, where the X-TRACT unit operates in the pre-treatment line alongside other, conventional equipment. The X-TRACT 1200 unit at the Eco-Park works intensively in separating inert materials (such as glass, stones and metal) from the flow of organic waste which the plant processes. The unit leaves the latter at optimum purity, ready to be fed into the digesters, where the biomethanisation process takes place.
Thanks to the unit’s outstanding features and its self-protected design, the X-TRACT unit has gained special endorsement from the Spanish Ministry of Industry. It therefore requires no special authorisation to be installed or operated in Spanish territory.
BENEFITS
"Our experience with X-TRACT has been highly positive."
Miguel Ángel López, head of the Eco-Park plant, said: “After three years in operation, our experience with X-TRACT has been highly positive. It has helped us reach our declared objectives because it enables us to guarantee the minimum quality required in the product obtained and thereby increase the overall performance of our process."
“The unit has achieved the main objective of guaranteeing a low amount of inert content in our output material, making it ideal to be used in the digestion process. Adaptation to the unit’s use was easy, as its handling and operating rules are fairly simple, as is its basic maintenance. We previously had problems in the digesters related to the decantation of inert materials in their interiors, which have been considerably reduced, so introducing this equipment has contributed to lowering maintenance costs and improving overall performance, by stabilizing our operation.”