Germany-based Otto Dorner’s C&D/commercial recycling plant thrives thanks to strong markets, tipping fee

By William Turley, Associate Publisher & Editor

If you‘ve heard it once, you have heard it 100 times, Europe is way ahead of North America in recycling, and that includes C&D recycling. But it is easy to believe that when examining a plant such as the Otto Dorner operation outside of Hamburg, Germany.

This highly automated recycling operation sports some of the latest technology available for recyclers of C&D and commercial waste, including equipment hardly or not yet even used in the United States, including optical sorting and 3-D trommel screens. Only 10 sorters are needed on this high-volume plant, making it a high tonnage per sorter operation. The material is sorted into a variety of end products to a point where there is only a 7% residual rate, although part of Europe’s advantage is the many markets available that North American recyclers can only dream about because of the environmental rules in place. However, in some respects where Otto Dorner operates in Germany, not far from the border from Holland, the environmental regulations are stricter than the U.S.

“It is illegal to dump construction waste into landfills in Germany, so you have two options,” said Enno Simonis, general manager of the plant. “The waste can go to an incinerator, and all that would be left are the aggregate materials. Or it can be sorted at a facility such as ours. But the cheapest way in our country is to sort the material because our tipping fees are much lower than an incinerator.”

He should know, as the Otto Dorner plant operates literally in the shadow of one such incinerator. “Our main competitors are those waste burning facilities, such as the one next to us. But they require higher tipping fees to be economically viable as they have very high technical standards. They are not allowed to pollute, so they have to spend millions and millions of Euros to clean the air.”

But despite the incinerator being the plant’s competition, Simonis is not opposed to energy from waste. “There is a lot of energy in the waste. We used to throw it away. But in Germany we do not think putting material in landfills is good for future generations. It is wrong to use up all the usual energy sources from our children and leave them all the waste somewhere in the earth.”

The majority of the products made from the plant’s infeed are some type of fuel, including a refuse-derived fuel (RDF) that if allowed to be used more readily in the United States would increase all mixed C&D facility recycling rates while cutting down on residuals.

The facility receives 162,000 tons of waste per year. About 40% is C&D, 50% commercial and industrial, with the rest some household waste, but no putrescibles. While the company does have a fleet of dump trucks and roll-offs working the region and supply material to the plant, there is also a steady stream of other haulers using the facility.

The waste is dumped into a large, three-side building to allow a steady stream of traffic easy access. A large Caterpillar material handler with orange peel grapple feeds the material into a three-axle, low-speed, high-torque pre-shredder to produce a 2-ft minus product. With three axles little fines are created in order to help later processing. Also, 2-ft minus is the largest possible size the optical sorters can handle, although of course some pieces larger than 2 ft still pass through.

Next is the interesting Walair 3-D drum screen that separates everything under 2 ft from the overs that are allowed to slide to the end of screen. Trommels always worked in C&D recycling, but fell out of favor because they could not stand the harsh environment, and because long slivers of wood could pass through the holes into the minus pile, messing up that line. The
3-D comes from the fact that open-sided buckets are under the 2-ft holes on this screen, stopping the long pieces from falling through and pushing them down the line with the rest of the larger material. This prevents clogging and downtime, as well.

Taking out the larger pieces here allows the real 2-ft minus to head toward the automated part of the plant. The next process is a second trommel that on its first half removes everything under 2 inch and sends it past a conveyor with a magnet on it.

The other part of the stream that enters the second trommel to be split in half in order to be later presented properly to the optical sorters, which can handle only so much material at one time. Particles smaller than 2 inch are separated onto a flat screen with a ½-inch mesh. The ½-inch to 2 inch, and the 2 inch to 2 ft fractions are separated from lighter RDF fraction (paper, plastics) by the use of a Walair air separators. The heavier stones, rubble, non-ferrous, waste, granulate, and wood are sent to a water separator. This unit produces a floating fraction that is mostly wood with some trash and dirt, and the sinking fraction are the heavies. Later hand sorting is used on both streams to remove trash and non-ferrous metals.

Optical sorters have been tried in the United States before, with mixed results, although there are a few mixed C&D operations using them successfully at the current time. They certainly seem to be successful at the Otto Dorner plant, as the lighter fraction is separated in streams of paper/cardboard, film and PVC by means of two continuously placed Ti-Tech optical separators.

All of this sorting equipment is housed in an impressive building with a state-of-the-art dust control system that keeps the air surprisingly clean. Part of the reason for that may be because drywall is a relatively new addition to the European, and many of the walls are plaster. Still, plaster can be dusty, and this is a very clean plant.
Outputs from the plant are:
28% wood
23% sand
21% aggregate
17% RDF
7% residual
2% ferrous
2% non-ferrous

The wood most often is used as a fuel product and is ground and sized on site. In a change from the United States, the aggregate is often the most difficult material to find a home for, according to Simonis. Inerts are one of the few materials that are allowed to be landfilled, although the sand product does have some uses. “Sand and gravel are pretty inexpensive where we are, and the regulations for aggregate recycling are very strict,” he said. “It is one of the few things we are allowed to dump, and we may to do more of that in the future.” The residual has no such luck, cannot be dumped, and is sent to an incinerator.

But the RDF is an intriguing product. Made up mostly of small pieces of wood, paper, film, and other plastics, but no PVC, the RDF is welcomed by large users of energy, such as cement kilns, chemical plants, and paper mills. A lot of what was seen used as the RDF probably would have to go to a landfill in North America.

“In Germany, the industry recognizes the Btu value is worth making a fuel out of it. This is a concept that has evolved in the past five years, sparking the growth of the RDF market. We are still paying to get rid of the RDF, but that cost has gone down steadily in the past five years, and its value is going to continue to rise,” said Simonis.

They also had to pay to move the wood fuel product, but that has since changed as well, and payments to the end user a rare nowadays. Other fuels are not as accessible. Besides the rise in the price of oil, coal is not as plentiful in Europe and can be difficult to reach.

In a way government has been supportive of the recycling industry, Simonis said. It did erect the disposal ban and makes sure it is enforced. But besides making sure recycling sites are actually recycling, and making sure they are operated safely, government pretty much gets out of the way of the recycling industry, letting market forces take over, which is not the same in the United States.

Plus there are the economics. “I have been to the United States several times and toured landfills and examined collection techniques,” Simonis said. “The price of your tipping fee is too low for really good recycling. Germany and The Netherlands is much smaller than the U.S. We have to think more about what is happening in our neighbor’s yard than in America. There you go out of town 10 miles and no one is around, and you can have a dump. Over here it is very difficult to find a spot for a landfill, and impossible to permit one.”

Besides recycling plants, Otto Dorner is a hauler, an exporter of plastic and paper, has a few landfills, and is very active in the sand and gravel business. “Recycling is nice and all, but it only works if the price of landfilling or incineration is expensive. The breakeven point here in Europe is around 50 Euros [$65]. It is profitable to recycle. This is our business, and we are involved deeply in it and making good money for it,” Simonis said.

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Catching Up to the Europeans

About a dozen years ago, I was in Europe on business when I was allowed to tour a C&D recycling facility in The Netherlands. This Lubo plant was state-of-the-art at the time, and frankly was far ahead of anything then in North America. I wrote about it in a predecessor magazine, and there was a lot of interest in the new technology.

Recently, I was invited by Eric and Pieter van Dijk of Lubo USA to again head over to the Old World to see what was promised to be the latest technology in the sorting of C&D materials. There was no pressure to promote one brand or way of doing the sorting, as the plants we saw did not have a lot of Lubo equipment per se, although the systems were available in North America through the company.

And that technology is impressive as one can see from the accompanying article on one of the more sophisticated plants we toured. But what is probably just as impressive are the end markets and recycling infrastructure that is set up in at least Germany and Holland. Of course there are several factors that promote recycling, including a lack of space for landfills and intense public pressure against new ones, which promotes higher tipping fees that are rarely seen here. But also the government has supported recycling in two ways: first with disposal bans such as the one in Massachusetts and some municipalities throughout North America. The other is, in the words of the general manager of the plant featured here, they then get out of the way. That certainly is not the case on this side of the pond. While government environmental agencies all say they support recycling, almost all put onerous rules on recyclers that it makes economically unfeasible. Or they say they support recycling and enact rules for that, but can’t or won’t do anything about that other division in their same agency that makes the regulations that either hurt the recycler, or more commonly kill off the end markets, the most important part of recycling.

Those markets are an example of how Europe is ahead of the U.S. The most obvious one is the refuse-derived fuel, or RDF. The stream containing small plastic pieces, paper, and wood is used as a fuel in energy intensive industries. If that market could be further developed in the states, recycling rates would rise tremendously.

Of course, to do that C&D recyclers and others in the business would have to overcome the prejudices and misconceptions about waste to energy operations, including those that use such an RDF fuel. The biggest opponent to that use in North America are the environmental groups that say it will pollute the air, despite stack emission controls on the boilers that use the material. One theory I heard in Europe as to why the “greens” don’t object to its use is because they have been co-opted into the government some time ago, and being on the inside see the big picture, including the need for environmentally friendly fuel products as opposed to fossil fuels.

But for years the saying was that in C&D recycling Europe is ahead of the United States. After this tour, I would agree. However, like that first tour some dozen years ago, gradually a lot of the ideas migrate here. Some are here already including the use of optical sorters and huge air classifiers. Expect everything else to be here shortly. But for the forward thinking that provides the end markets and boosts recycling rates, let’s hope that doesn’t keep missing the boat across the Atlantic.

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