The Waste Management Association of Friesland/Wittmund in northern Germany is prepared for the future with five FAN separators.
What began as a pure landfill in the seventies – a typical solution of the day – has developed over the last 40 years into a cutting-edge waste management center, where 60 employees keep the operations running smoothly at the company’s 20-hectare facility. At the Wiefels waste management center, the Waste Management Association of Friesland/Wittmund maintains a landfill, a percolation treatment plant, a composting plant, a mechanical-biological waste treatment plant and a self-drop-off area for its members. More than 30 different waste categories, organized with a clever guiding line system, are available to the residents of the districts of Friesland, Wittmund and Cloppenburg as well as the cities of Delmenhorst, Oldenburg and Wilhelmshaven.
The process looks as follows: General waste (household waste and similar commercial wastes) is mechanically shredded and then sieved at 0-40 mm. It is then mixed with water and sieved again at 0-20 mm. The next step is sand removal (any sand still present is filtered out, the sand sinks to the bottom), followed by the fermenter. Fermenting the organic fraction of the waste produces biogas, which is used to generate electricity for supplying the facility’s equipment or for feeding into the public grid.
The fermentation remains are taken from the fermenters and subjected to separation. This is where the FAN separators come into play! Five separators can be automatically activated in sequence, depending on the incoming quantity and the throughput of each individual separator. Each separator has its own holding tank of about 0.5 cubic meters. When this is full, the next separator and its holding tank are automatically activated. After separation with the PSS, the liquid medium is filtered again in a decanter and separated from the residual solids. The liquid fraction left over here is reintroduced into the process. The solids are landfilled after separation.
