The city in Romania that treats waste through molecular disintegration and thus transforms garbage into clean energy

The contract for the purchase of the first installation for the treatment, by molecular disintegration, of municipal waste from the territory of Cluj County was signed on Wednesday.

The President of the Cluj County Council, Mr. Alin Tişe, signed on Wednesday, in the presence of the winner of the auction, the contract regarding the design and execution of the treatment facility by molecular disintegration for the energy recovery of municipal waste from Cluj County.

The awarded value of the contract is 60,794,052 lei, without VAT, the financing being provided from the Cluj County Council’s own funds.

The winner of the auction is Waste Powertech SRL.

“We are at the end of a winding road and the beginning of a new stage in terms of waste management in our county. It is about an ultra-modern installation that has the role of significantly reducing the quantities of municipal waste resulting from the sorting of recyclables and mechanical-biological treatment, so that we can fit into the target established by the National Waste Management Strategy: the energy recovery of the minimum 15% of municipal waste by 2025. It is an audacious goal that we can tick off much more easily now, all the more so since the proposed technical solution is an ecological one, which will generate green energy that can be economically exploited. Moreover, according to our estimates, the energy produced in one year covers the consumption of the County Council, the Cluj Arena stadium and the other subordinate institutions”, says Alin Tişe, president of the Cluj County Council.

The molecular disintegration station will be completed in the first part of next year and will be able to be upgraded with new modules, depending on the identified needs.

The first stage is dedicated to design. According to the contract, the contractor of the works will have to perform including the operation and maintenance of the installation during the 3-year warranty period, during which the County Council will not have any additional costs.

The installation, fully automated, will be located within the Technical Zone of the Cluj Integrated Waste Management Center, on an area of ​​about 1000 square meters, in the immediate vicinity of the Sorting Station and the TMB Station.

According to the technical data in the specifications, the molecular disintegration station will be able to energetically utilize an amount of approximately 25,000 tons of residual waste/year. The technological process specific to such an installation presupposes going through, in advance, the stage of shredding to a grain size of less than 25 mm and drying to a humidity of less than 20%. Afterwards, the waste is introduced into the station’s reactor for the chemical decomposition stage (molecular disintegration). The resulting gases are passed through a complex system of cleaning, cooling, filtering and storage in a pressure tank. From this tank, the gases are introduced into the engine of the current generator, energy that will be delivered to the national energy system.

Concretely, from a quantity of 1 ton of shredded and dry waste, about 400 m³ of gas can be obtained, the exact amount depending on the calorific capacity of the waste. From the gases thus obtained, and which have a caloric capacity similar to that of methane gas, approx. 1.1-1.15 MW/h electric current, of which up to 10% will be used for the operation of the installation. Thus, by generating the resulting gas over the course of a year, the County Council aims to produce approximately 18,240.00 MWh.