Case, Environment & Climate Change
Installation and equipment, metropolitan Ecoparc 4 consortium
Ecoparc4 is a mechanical and biological treatment plant for municipal waste, located in Paratge Can Mata, km 8.5, in the municipality of Els Hostalets de Pierola.
Tags: Waste management, waste treatment plant, biological treatment facilities
Challenges addressed
If the waste is recycled or compost, you no longer need to take up space of storage, nor worry about preventing it from contaminating the environment. A plus, it’s always easier and cheaper to reuse used materials that create them again from materials first. For this reason, they have built treatment plants for waste, which they separate and recover the materials so that they are finished and later converted into new products or energy In the metropolitan area of Barcelona are produced annually more than 1,300,000 tons of waste, from which 65% are from the rest fraction (grey container). It is important to do a good separation in the home and only deposit in the grey container all those wastes that should not be disposed of taken to the rubbish bin or deposited in the other containers.
In this way, the eco-parks (some facilities that recover waste that is still useful) do not have to invest so much time and money in recovering everything we don’t have correctly separated.
So, doing a good collection of selective recovery is facilitated.
Main objectives
In the mechanical treatment, the recyclable materials are extracted with the help of machines and the organic matter by hand. In doing so, a material remains that cannot be used: the reject.
Recyclable materials are packaged and delivered to various recyclers, who will use them as secondary raw materials in new products. The organic matter is passed to the biological treatment.
The waste is bagged or compacted and destined for final treatment, such as controlled deposition or energy recovery.
Composting: organic matter is degraded with oxygen and becomes compost or biostabilized, depending on the quality of the waste from which it came.
The Hostalets de Pierola eco-park treats waste differently in metropolitan municipalities and the part southeast of the Anoia region.
The installation is part of the set of metropolitan plants for municipal waste treatment.
Facts
Project type Recycling, metropolitan waste management, eco-parks
Partnership Ecoparc 4 is part of the deployment of facilities provided for in the Territorial Sectoral Plan for Municipal Waste Management Infrastructures, which specifies the treatment plants necessary to dispose of the waste generated by the municipalities that are part of the Environmental Entity of the Metropolitan Area, that is to say, 33 municipalities in the urban conurbation of Barcelona that gather more than 3 million inhabitants.
The partnership is composed by: Department of Environment an Housing of the Generalitat de Catalunya, through the Waste Agency of Catalonia, the Metropolitan Entity of Hydraulic Services and Treatment of Residus, and the Hostalets de Pierola Council have created the Ecoparc 4 Consortium.
Funding The construction of this facility represents an investment of nearly 59 million euros financed by the Generalitat de Catalunya through the program contract with the Agència de Residus de Catalunya, which is the promoter, together with the Entitat del Medi Ambient and the Ajuntament dels Hostalets de Pierola, given that the three bodies have set up the Ecoparc 4 Consortium.
Start date 2011- 2025
Website
All contents are in Catalan
Project description
Ecoparks are environmental mechanical biological treatment facilities that treat the two fractions of municipal waste that contain organic matter.
Located in the area of Can Mata, in the municipality of Hostalets de Pierola, Ecoparc 4 has been serving several metropolitan municipalities and the southeastern part of the Anoia region since 2011.
From the FORM and the rest, the Ecoparc dels Hostalets de Pierola extracts three resources:
- Recoverable materials, which have not been properly separated at source, such as metal, plastic, or brick containers.
- Compost, is an organic fertilizer that, depending on the quality of the waste from which it is produced, can be used in agriculture and/or gardening.
- Biostabilized, which is used as a soil substrate in controlled deposit backfills, public works, and quarries
To do this, first apply a mechanical pretreatment to the FORM and the rest, always separately. The aim of this pretreatment, both in the case of organics and in the case of the rest, is to remove the organic matter from the waste that is not organic and to recover the recyclable materials.
It then applies a biological treatment to the organic matter separately that has been removed in each line:
It is allowed to decompose under controlled conditions, in what is technically called “aerobic fermentation”. As a result of this process, you get compost or biostabilized depending on the origin of the organic matter, which can be used as a substrate, organic amendment, or organic fertilizer depending on the quality.
The contract for the construction and operation of the fourth metropolitan waste treatment plant was awarded to CESPA Gestión de Residuos (nowadays PREZERO GR), and subsequently, a specific company was created, called Ecoparc de Can Mata which was subrogated in its position and is the current operator The end of the operation of the contract is October 31, 2025.
Impact and results
The Hostalets de Pierola eco-park is a mechanical treatment plant and biological of municipal waste (remainder and organic fraction). Its functions are: a) recover the materials that can be valorized later take them to the recycling plants and b) treat the organic matter by turning it into compost or biostabilized.
Installation data
- Treatment capacity (t/year, nominal): 360,000 (285,000 rest and 75,000 FORM).
- The facility occupies an area of 11.46 hectares.
- Type of treatment: mechanical and biological treatment of FORM and other municipal waste.
- Recovered effects/products: paper, cardboard, plastics (PET, PEAD, film, and mix), bricks, magnetic scrap, aluminum, digest.
- Compost production (t/year, nominal): 16,500.
- Biostabilized production (t/year, nominal): 48,500.
- Recovered by-products (t/year, nominal): 36,725.
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