Northern Irish waste-to-energy facility Full Circle Generation has announced that it's now turned over 100,000 metric tons of local rubbish into energy.
Northern Ireland has come a long way with its development of clean energy in recent years thanks to increases in renewable generation from wind turbines, but now we're making strides on another ecological challenge: Household rubbish. The Full Circle Generation facility is the largest of its kind in Northern Ireland, reclaiming household waste and turning into energy.
The facility finished construction in February 2018 and officially began full-scale operations in August 2019, and in the past year it's managed to process over 100,000 metric tons of household rubbish to generate energy. It expects to reach a capacity of over 140,000 met tons over the next 12 months, providing a useful alternative to landfill.
The facility is a gasification plant that extracts gasses from treated waste and then burns it to run a standard generator, with the electricity generated being supplied directly to Bombardier. The treated waste fuel is created in local waste treatment facilities in Garvagh and Portadown from household waste, after first extracting recuyclable components.
Full Circle Generation Director Brett Ross commented on the milestone: "Full Circle Generation, Northern Ireland’s only large scale Energy from Waste facility, has changed how the waste sector has traditionally operated. With the processing of its first 100,000mt of fuel completed, we have demonstrated the robustness of the design of this plant and shown that this is an effective solution and a proven alternative to the landfilling of waste, or the need to export Refused Derived Fuel (RDF) to mainland Europe."
Source: Written based on press release
