In a space covering close to 8000 m2, over 120 companies from Spain and other European countries direct exhibitors displayed a broad range of elements of equipment, systems and services for municipal and industrial waste recovery, recycling and treatment.

Close to 7000 professionals from the public and private waste handling and treatment sectors visited the show.

According to a survey taken among the attendees and exhibitors at ExpoRecicla 2008, the event was a great success. “The Recovery, Recycling Waste-to-Value industry needed an event specially designed to its characteristics; and ExpoRecicla responds perfectly to that need.”  This sentence spoken by one of the largest exhibitors summarizes the opinion of the participants.

ExpoRecicla 2009 is expected to meet ambitious commercial objectives that will surely more than compensate the significant effort that it will represent for the participating companies and organisations.

Those objectives can be summarised as follows:

• To take advantage of the great success of the first edition of ExpoRecicla, in 2008, and the useful service it offered to the environment industry.

 

• To provide a platform capable of promoting the activities and initiatives of the sector and furthering their interests by, for example, calling for more public investment in waste-treatment and waste-to-value facilities.

• To place the event in an adequate timeframe within the national and international exhibitions calendar, to enable participating companies to optimise their promotional resources.

 

• To reinforce the high-level International Conference on Waste Treatment and Management, scheduled to give continuity to the successful first Conference held during ExpoRecicla 2008.

If these objectives are achieved, the second ExpoRecicla, to be held in Zaragoza from November 17 through 19, 2009 will play a significant role in furthering the development of the environmental care industry in Spain and abroad.

The first step is meeting of the ExpoRecicla Steering committee, to take place in the third week of January in the Ministry of the Environment, in Madrid.

The next day, a morning session on plastics recovery and recycling, and an afternoon devoted to Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, WEEEs; to complete the Conference the next morning, a Round Table with the participation of the leading Associations and Authorised Waste Handlers, on recovery and recycling of different types of materials.  This were the basic components of the ExpoRecicla Conference, held from September 22 through 24, 2008.

Over forty speakers, authorities in each of their respective fields spoke before over 300 delegates, who participated in the lively debates that followed each presentation.  The Conference was inaugurated by Marina Sevilla, Director General of Environmental Quality and Climate Change in the Department of Environment of the Regional Government of Aragón. Ms. Sevilla announced an important change in the waste-management policy of the Region, concretely with respect to waste-to-energy.

The majority of the participants considered that the Conference was a great success, and that it took place at an opportune time.  They also indicated that they felt that its contents were of great current interest and they praised the high qualification of the speakers and moderators.  The organisers of ExpoRecicla 2009, to be held in November, in Zaragoza, Spain, are now preparing a new edition of the Conference.

However, one of the main innovations in the Plan is its emphasis on producing energy from municipal solid waste.  Indeed, one of the objectives of the new Plan to increase the capacity to produce energy from MSW at a rate of 600,000 tonnes/year up to 2012, which represents a 30% increase with respect to the base year 2006.  For that purpose, new incinerator plants must be built, the number and location of which are given in detail in the draft law.

As is known, practically any waste-to-energy project can count on strong opposition from ecologist groups and residents of the municipalities in which they are planned to be built. However, an ever increasing volume of waste, the trend of the European Directives, and the national legislation applied in each country toward “zero dumping” (the progressive reduction of the waste dumped in landfills down to its virtual elimination) require that no possibility be discarded, from Reduction of waste production and Reuse and Recycling (the famous “three “Rs” of waste treatment) to waste-to-energy systems and Incineration.

Incineration is losing its bad reputation (Greenpeace identifies it with “burning the taxpayers’ money) and has already become a serious alternative in countries such as Denmark and Germany. The close to seventy high-tech incinerator plants in operation in Denmark have helped to reduce the waste fraction that ends up in the landfill to only 8% (seven times less than in Spain).

A report from Germany’s Environment Ministry, cited by AEVERSU, states that the dioxin and furane emissions produced by the 72 incinerator plants in Germany have diminished over 1000 times since 1990, while the amount of waste incinerated has grown 44%.