France / Spain | The French capital city of Paris and the surrounding towns have awarded a Euro 425 million euro contract to Spanish waste management company Urbaser for the management of urban waste over the next twelve years. The company, dedicated to logistics and the environment within ACS Group, becomes the first foreign company to take part in the waste management business in the French capital and its surroundings.
To this end, Urbaser will build a new urban waste processing plant in Paris, to be located in the Romainville district, which will be among the most modern facilities in Europe, claims the company. This facility will be responsible for the processing of nearly one fourth of the waste generated in the French capital and its surroundings, corresponding to the ‘output’ of over one million people.
According to Urbaser, given that it is located in the heart of the city, the plant design will be highly innovative and it will be fully integrated by means of vegetable roofing that will cover the plant almost entirely, and it will also feature an avant-garde architectural approach. The waste will arrive at the facilities via trucks, railway and river barges — the plant will have its own railway station and pier adjacent to a channel on the Seine.
The plant will process over 400,000 tonnes of solid urban waste a year and it will be finished in 2011. Until it is completed and operations begin, Urbaser will manage waste from Paris and the surrounding areas by using existing facilities as from 1st June 2008.
The facilities that Urbaser will be building and operating as a result of the award of this public contract, which the company pursued for over a year, will produce 60 Gigawatts of electric power a year via a bio-methane process, consisting in the processing of organic waste to obtain gas that in turn is used to generate electric power. This biomethanisation plant will be the largest in Europe.
Apart from the above, Urbaser has also been awarded a 20-year concession for the construction and operation of a future waste processing plant on the island of Guadeloupe in the French Antilles. The contract is worth Euro 590 million.
The French Overseas Department of Guadeloupe has a population of 450 000 and the future waste processing plant, the construction of which is scheduled to last 43 months, will process 150,000 tons of waste per year that will enable the production of 65 Gigawatts of electric power.
With these two large contracts, the French affiliate Urbaser Environnement will now have six urban waste processing facilities on French soil: Marseille, Roanne, Varennes-Jarcy, Calais, Paris and Guadeloupe. Together they represent a portfolio of over Euro 2 billion.
