The boiler uses about 250 tonnes of wood in a heating season. It’s not that much compared to the mulch production, but it provides “a significant savings over using propane or natural gas to heat the facili-ties,” says Traquair. “It doesn’t take long for those boilers to pay for themselves.” Future plans Ecco Waste Systems is now in the process of building and permitting a material re-covery facility (MRF) that will eventually sort and recycle a majority of the waste that arrives at the site. “In about 2004, we started looking at different options for processing all or much of the waste stream, and we visited MRFs all across the country, primarily in the United States, but there are a few in Canada too,” says Hamman. In the MRF , a sequence of equipment and sorters separates all the materials (i.e., wood, plastics, cardboard, paper, metals, and gypsum), and sends them to different streams, which will help save even more space in the landfill. The clean wood would continue to supply their current markets, as well as feed a second KOB boiler installed in the MRF A small Cat loader drops mulch onto a conveyor, which takes it to the Colorbiotics dyeing machine to be coloured. to provide heating. The company also an-ticipates making refuse-derived fuel (RDF) from the mixed wood debris, for which there are already potential industrial-scale customers. Hamman says that they’re also con-sidering the possibility of using RDF to produce heat and power for the MRF . “Our power cost for a single shift at this MRF is estimated to be in the range of $850,000 a year. So it’s an awful lot of money being paid for power, which we could generate.” However, he says, they are still consider-ing whether they want to become a power generator, which would be another new venture for the company. • THE COMPLETE SOLUTION TO BIOMASS FEEDSTOCK MANAGEMENT From Concept To Completion Alternative Fuel Solutions From Vecoplan A worldwide leader in size reduction technology, Vecoplan designs, engineers, manufactures, and implements complete biomass feedstock preparation systems, including pre-shredding, separation, screening, air classification, re-shredding, storage, unloading, sampling, and fuel delivery. Working with individual customers, Vecoplan delivers technologically advanced, material specific, and application specific shredding, ferrous and non-ferrous removal, size and density separation, screening and classification technologies and extremely efficient conveyor and bulk material handling, metering, storage and unloading technologies. Contact Vecoplan today to learn more about our existing systems or to arrange a visit to one, or several, of our installations. Phone: (336) 861-6070 • Fax: (336) 861-4329 vecoplanllc.com Canadian BIOMASS 21
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