Capacity
180.000 tons/year
The brief
The municipality of Oslo aims for a circular waste system. The amount of recycled waste is to reach 50% before 2019 and household waste sorting is mandatory.
About 80% of the inhabitants in Oslo live in multi-family housings or terraced houses so space for adding more bins is very limited. The entire municipality of Oslo, with more than 600.000 inhabitants, is using the optical sorting system by Envac.
Resources
Food, plastics and residual waste
Users
650.000
The solution
Considering the limited space for more bins and the amount of heavy transport in Oslo the choice fell on optical sorting.
Using Envac’s optical sorting system the municipality could keep the same bins and the same vehicles could be used while the transports could be kept at a minimum.
Food waste becomes biogas and biofertilizer, while plastic is recycled and the residual waste fraction is used to produce district heating and electricity.
Development
In 2009 the first optical soring plant (Haraldrud) was opened in Oslo. With that, Oslo became the first major city in Scandinavia to introduce the system.
In 2012 the second plant (Klemetsrud) was deployed. The entire municipality was now using optical sorting.
In 2013 the client together with Envac developed post-treatment techniques for the plastic fraction in order to refine the material further.
Related Projects
Sorting Biostoom Beringen, Belgium
Limburg Optimo Sorting, Belgium
The Limburg Optimo Sorting Facility was launched in 2022 and services 32 municipalities, enabling smarter sorting for more than 300 000 households. The facility sorts 5 different fractions: food waste, garden waste, textile waste, residual waste and plastic/metal packaging. The facility is built to be flexible and has the option to add 2 more fractions in the future.
Sorting Halmstad, Sweden
Halmstad
The plant is owned and operated by HEM (Halmstad Energi och Miljö AB). It’s built for two fractions, food and rest, with the option to easily extend it to six fractions. The brand new building also contains a pre-treatment facility for the sorted food waste, which becomes biofuel.
Sorting Linköping, Sweden
Linköping
The target is a region Östergötland without fossil fules in 2030. This was the main political factor for the municipality of Linköping to introduce household collection of food waste using optical sorting.