Belgian company converts industrial waste into energy
Family-owned business Vyncke of Harelbeke in West Flanders has been designing and building combustion plants to convert biomass into green energy for decades. Now it is focusing on the use of non-recyclable residual waste from industry as an energy source.
In 2011, Vyncke installed a type of underground combustion boiler in a 100-hectare park in Singapore that converts pruning waste into steam for electricity. The residual heat was used to cool the tropical greenhouse in the park. This way of processing biomass gave the company worldwide fame. In 2020, it introduced a similar project in Sirjansland in the Dutch province of Zeeland. There are now small-scale gardeners who heat their greenhouses with a biomass plant from Vyncke. This plant captures the CO₂ from the flue gases, filters them out, and eventually injects them back into the greenhouse. An economically viable model.
The breakthrough, however, came with Vyncke's conversion of non-recyclable industrial residual fractions of paper, cardboard, plastic, rubber and wood into energy, so-called recovered solid fuels. The Swedish town of Säffle, for example, processes that waste into hot water for its municipal heat network. In Sweden, Thailand and the UK, this SRF (solid recovered fuel) technology from Vyncke is already a reality, with France hot on their heels. And the potential at companies and in countries is great, especially with the growing waste mountain and the ever stricter climate regulations to dispose of waste in an environmentally friendly way.