BIC Group’s plants thermally treat non-recyclable waste streams and convert generated thermal energy into usable energy carriers. Hot air, hot pressurized water, steam, thermal fluid and electric power or any combination of these are possible. This way our plants serve as a source of renewable energy.

An example, we built a plant that processes 2.5 tonnes per hour of halogenated industrial waste. It also co-generates up to 2000kW of electric power along with 8000kW of heat. This gives a yield of about 75% energy recovery efficiency.

Fly ashes and pollutants in the raw flue gases limit the energy recovery efficiency in any thermal waste treatment process. The heat transfer equipment is potentially subject to fouling and acid dew point corrosion. To avoid these issues, the design avoids certain operational ranges which reduces efficiency.

On the other hand, any recovered energy is a pure win because a properly designed incinerator runs without support fuel. The waste generates all the recoverable thermal energy. Combined heat and power (co-generation) is definitely the way to go. Low level energy in the form of heat remains downstream of every turbo-generator.

For smaller sized plants where electricity generation isn’t economically viable, the combination with autoclaves are a good alternative. Autoclaves can use the steam generated from heat recovery for sterilization of recyclable wastes from the same industries.

Energy from Waste (EFW) plants plants are also called Energy Recovery Facilities (ERF). Names such as Thermal Oxidizer, Pyrolysis kiln, and even Calciner again refer to basically very similar plant, only running with different combustion parameters, mainly oxygen level. Therefore, BIC counter-current kilns are not limited to old-school incineration only, but can configured and tuned to serve different purposes in a wide range of applications.