The consortium of Amsterdam Waste Environmental Consultancy & Technology B.V. (AWECT) and Waste Management, Inc. obtained original proponent status for its proposal to construct the most advanced WtE plant in Asia. This came after the Province of Cebu in the Philippines accepted the consortium’s proposal on June 10, 2021, to build a 36-megawatt High Efficiency Waste-to-Energy (HE WtE) facility.
The proposed facility will deploy AWECT’s state-of-the-art High Efficiency (HE) technology, processing 1,500 tonnes of residual solid waste per day, collected from all local governments in the Province of Cebu.
The facility will be located in Barangay Tinaan in Naga City and the project duration is 25 years, which can be extended by another 25 years.
Landmark project for the local community
The project will bring approximately USD 200 million as private investment into the Province of Cebu and will be undertaken at no cost to the provincial government. Once implemented, the project will provide income to the province in the form of a percentage of the project’s revenues.
The HE WtE plant will divert 85 to 90 per cent of the waste that currently goes to the province’s landfill sites and it is planned to create 100 to120 high skilled local direct jobs, plus hundreds of indirect ones.
Additional benefits of this facility to the local community include reduction of air pollution, odour, littering and a lower risk of water contamination.
The waste challenge in Cebu
The Province of Cebu has consistently been awarded the status of the wealthiest province in the Philippines by the country’s Commission on Audit. This rapid economic and population growth has, therefore, generated an increase in the output of solid waste. Current solutions are no longer optimal as they devote an increasing amount of land to be used as landfill.
For this reason, the consortium proposed the deployment of the same expertise used to build the AEB Amsterdam facility, which is the most efficient and the cleanest WtE plant in the world. The plant in Amsterdam can generate 900 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity from each ton of waste and has processed over 5.5 million tons of waste since its commissioning in 2008. AWECT expects similar success from its Cebu facility.
By turning the waste into electricity in a controlled manner, waste is diverted from landfill, avoiding the emission of CO2 and other harmful greenhouse gasses (GHG) emitted by landfill.
More information on AWECT can be found at www.awect.com.
