Inauguration ceremony for Lower Saxony's first sewage sludge mono-incineration plant

Premiere in Lower Saxony

With great pleasure, EEW inaugurated the first sewage sludge mono-incineration plant of the group of companies and the federal state in the presence of Lower Saxony's Minister President Stephan Weil.

The plant, designed for a capacity of 160,000 tonnes of dry sewage sludge, is capable to utilise a fifth of the sewage sludge produced in Lower Saxony and in a safely and environmentally friendly way. At the same time, around 5,000 households benefit from the energy generated by being supplied with electricity. EEW has invested more than 60 million euros and created almost 20 new qualified jobs.

Basis for the recovery of phosphorus

In such a plant, only the sludge that accumulates in sewage treatment plants is thermally utilised - i.e. incinerated and processed. In this way, EEW creates the conditions for the subsequent recycling of phosphorus contained in sewage sludge. If sewage sludge is co-incinerated in coal-fired power plants or waste incineration plants, the pollutants it contains are destroyed, but the valuable phosphorus is also irretrievably lost, as it can no longer be recovered from the ash. With the incineration of the sewage sludge in a mono-incineration plant, the phosphorus can be reused in a downstream process.