A NEW plan is under way to use recycled landfill material to power the Vassiliko cement factory near Limassol, a project that aims to tackle the island’s growing solid waste problem by turning it into a clean-burning fuel.
The Cyprus-based company, Resource, markets the processed landfill material as ‘green coal’ and touts it as a way to exploit municipal, commercial and agricultural waste to produce recycled fuel.
Waste disposal is an increasingly important issue as landfills cover more of the island by the day and incineration costs mount, largely because of the measures taken to minimise the toxins released from burning waste products.
“Today’s waste is tomorrow’s fuel. In a place like Cyprus, where fuel costs are rising every year, this will drastically cut down petroleum imports,” says Peter Hood, technical director of the project.
EU directives will ban all landfills for all organic waste by 2005. When organic materials break down, they produce ozone depleting methane and leachate, a by-product that seeps through the ground and can contaminate the water table.
Hood maintains that ‘green coal’ will prove more efficient than conventional fuels because of its low sulphur content. In fact, he claims that burning the material would not produce any toxins at all.
The Vassiliko plant has been accused of spewing smoke and dust into the air and this project would help to improve its environmental reputation.
According to statistics supplied by Resource, it would be possible to process 600,000 tonnes of the municipal, commercial, industrial and agricultural waste produced in Cyprus every year.
The green coal resulting after this waste is processed would generate 40 to 50 megawatts of electricity per year, says the company.
According to Resource, only 10 per cent of the original material would be left over after the process of converting waste into Green Coal. Without green coal, he maintains, only 15 per cent of the material could be recycled.
Hood reports that the project has received a great deal of support from the Agriculture Ministry.
He said that the same technology had been employed in India to turn banana waste into organic fertiliser. A contract for the same green coal product employed at the Vassiliko plant may be signed in India soon.
When asked about the viability of green coal at the plant, Christos Theophiou, a Chemical Engineer in charge of cement production and environmental management at Vassiliko, said: “as far as the product is concerned, it is excellent.” He believes that with the recycled material, it will be possible to replace up to 60 per cent of the conventional fuel used by the plant.
Now eleven months along, Hood estimates that the project will be fully operational approximately 15 months from the moment the plant secured all the government permits to start the new programme. He was not able to venture a guess as to when all the papers would be in order.
If the project gets up and running, the Vassiliko plant could serve as the central processing centre for the household waste from all over the island.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
