Ireland: Irish Cement has been designated a national priority site by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The subsidiary of CRH has been placed on a list of eight industrial sites that have failed to meet the necessary environmental standards. Six of the sites accounted for more than half of the complaints made to the EPA in 2017. The agency plans to update its priority list on a quarterly basis.

China/Taiwan: Taiwan Cement plans to invest in the Chinese waste recycling market by bidding on projects with local company Beijing Orient. TCC International, a subsidiary of Taiwan Cement, is to select one of its plants in China as the pilot site for the cement kiln project, according to the Taipei Times. The company has set a long-term capacity target of processing 10Mt/yr of waste that is expected to generate over US$688m of profit. At present its plant in Guizhou has an input capacity of 200t/day.

Denmark: Germany’s Remondis has purchased a majority stake in environmental services company M Larsen. Remondis runs a network of water management, recycling and industrial services in Northern Europe. M Larsen is a family-owned environmental service companies based in Bröndby near Copenhagen. Following the acquisition, the management team and owner Claus Barslund will remain part of the company.

Netherlands/UK: N+P Recycling says that it views a Chinese import ban on plastics as an opportunity for its business. As the Dutch company offers a variety of waste derived fuels for various applications it is encouraging companies to split both fractions to get the optimal waste solutions for each individual quality. Lower calorific value (CV) products are better suited to waste incineration plants whilst higher CV products are typically used by cement, lime, steel and power plants.

Lower grade materials, typically within an 8 - 12GJ/t range, are supplied within many of N+P’s long-term supply contracts, to users within the UK and within Europe. There are also a number of possibilities for materials that are in-between the standard refuse-derived fuel (RDF) and solid-recovered fuel (SRF) qualities, or mid-CV range (12 - 16 GJ/t). For higher quality materials, N+P has a number of solutions all focused on the replacement of primary fossil fuels such as coal.

N+P Recycling produces a higher CV waste fuel product called Subcoal. It is currently building a Subcoal plant at Teesside in the UK with a production capacity of up to 0.22Mt/yr. It has started to source and contract non-recyclable waste streams such as materials recovery rejects, industrial residues and plastic residues for unit. It is expected to open in the third quarter of 2018.