The theme is that of closing the waste cycle: this morning the Third Permanent Commission carried out an inspection of the Bolzano waste-to-energy plant. A visit which allowed the councilors to get to know the reality of Eco center Spa, the in-house company with entirely public capital that manages the main waste treatment plants, purification plants and the sewerage network in the province of Bolzano, and to delve deeper into the operation of the plant located in the Lungo Isarco left area.
The inspection was led by the general manager of the Eco center company and accompanied by the manager of the Spa’s waste treatment sector and the general manager of the Trentino purification agency.
Eco center and the plant
Eco center is a company that has 105 members and 211 employees; With 26 plants it manages 178,000 tonnes of waste per year and 38 million cubic meters of waste water. The company sees a turnover of 54 million euros and 255 kilometers of network. It sees production (2023 data) of 215,054 MWh and the sale of 187,923 MWh. The Bolzano waste-to-energy plant treats urban and similar special waste from the entire province and allows electricity and thermal energy to be recovered from the combustion of waste (all data is shown in the attached slides). To purify the fumes produced by combustion, it operates with a three-stage purification system.
Emissions, controls
The activity of the waste-to-energy plant, a construction built between Isarco and the motorway with a chimney 65 meters high, is carried out under strict and continuous monitoring and, as was highlighted by the general director, from an environmental point of view it does not cause problems, indeed, the solution is to consider the lower use of energy produced with the use of fossil fuels resulting from energy recovery and district heating. The reference data is the saving in 2023 of approximately 11,380,000 Smc of methane. The 2016-2018 “Landmonitoring” project also developed a pollutant dispersion model to evaluate the points of maximum emission impact: it emerged that the place most affected on the most meteorologically unfavorable day and time of the year was the Sigmundskron landfill . In that place and in those conditions the waste-to-energy plant accounts for 0.08% of fine particles and 0.9% of NOX.
Insights
Answering the questions of the councilors present, some differences between the Trentino system and the South Tyrolean one were highlighted. One above all is the organization, characterized in Trentino by a varied panorama (direct management systems, service contracts, in-house companies and mixed public-private companies coexist). Speaking of separate waste collection, however, the experts underlined the existing gap between the latter and recycling, which sees a gap resulting from separate waste collection of 15-20% in the province of Trento, 10% in the province of Bolzano (thermo-energised) .
