A new Dutch company, FoxFire, is turning paper mill waste into an energy product for the cement industry
February 2007
By Justin Toland, Editor
For a mill in a high-cost, mature market, the margin between survival and shutdown can be pretty fine. Squeezing every drop of value out of the facility is the name of the game. Today that also means making better use of 'waste' products, for instance, reusing process water.
One type of waste product, rejects, has traditionally been disposed of in landfill sites. New EU directives and changing national legislation mean that in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands it is no longer possible to send rejects to landfill. In other EU Member States, such as the UK, landfill taxes are increasing and a ban on rejects going to landfill may follow.
So, what to do with those rejects? A new company in the Netherlands has one solution. FoxFire BV, based in Foxhol, a village in Groningen province in the north of the country, is processing paper mill rejects into a secondary fuel for use by, in particular, the cement industry.
FoxFire was formed in September 2005 by managing director, Gert Felten. After starting his career at a Dunlop conveyor belt plant, Felten worked in the paperboard business for 15 years, being responsible for maintenance and other projects at two Kappa mills. When Felten found out he would be made redundant in early 2004, he decided to set up his own company.
The original idea was for FoxFire to turn paper mill rejects into two end products: building materials and secondary fuel. The latter had already been successfully pioneered by Smurfit Kappa Roermond Papier, also in the Netherlands, whose Rofire plant for making solid fuel pellets out of reject material, started up in 2000.
Turning mill rejects into building materials proved to be more complicated than initially thought, however, as it would require the development of new technology as well as new markets. Therefore, in December 2004, Felten decided to divide his original business plan into two stages and to concentrate on processing rejects for power generation in the first phase. "Building products can come later, although we have so much work now with FoxFire that it might take another five years," he says.
FoxFire began detail engineering and site clearing work in September 2005. Construction of the plant commenced on March 1, 2006, with the first production in August of last year.
The plant is built on a brownfield site that belongs to the starch derivatives producer, Avebe. Many parts of the large site have been unused for years. For instance, the building where FoxFire is located had been empty for more than a decade and Avebe had been considering demolishing it.
For Felten, there are many advantages to being a tenant on a large brownfield site: "This is an expensive plant to build -- if we built on a greenfield site there would be lots of additional costs." Instead, essentials such as roads, gatekeepers, water treatment facilities, a CHP plant and a canteen are already there, giving cost savings of "$3 million to $4 million".
Another advantage of Foxhol is its location close to a major highway and just 35 km from the seaport, Delfzijl. "We have a large storage area [at the port] that we will use when we start exporting to France and the UK," explains Felten. The first exports were set to start last month. For long-distance shipping, FoxFire will add an additional compacting step and put the material in bales and wrap in foil.
As of last November, FoxFire was sourcing rejects from six mills: four in the northern Netherlands, one in the southern part of the country and one in Germany. The capacity of the plant at Foxhol is 150,000 tonnes/yr. "We will take rejects from 10 to 15 mills at full capacity," reckons Felten.
"All the bad habits"
FoxFire's raw material consists of 60% paper mill rejects and 40% other materials, including sludge from PET factories (labels from bottles), household waste and plastic rejects from Knowaste, a firm that makes 40,000 tonnes/yr of paper pulp from used diapers at its plant in Arnhem, Netherlands.
"We specialize in wet materials," points out Felten. "Normal RDF (refuse-derived fuel) producers are not fond of wet materials." Mill reject material is, "The strangest material in the world," believes Felten. "It floats when you don't expect it to; it sinks when you expect it to float. It's a mixture of fiber and plastics: add up all the bad habits of plastics and multiply by 10 and then you have the behavior of rejects."
According to Felten, FoxFire's equipment may not be state-of-the-art, but, "It is specialized for reject handling."
FoxFire has a key alliance with N+P, a broker in industrial waste that is well established in the Benelux, France and Germany, and also now operating in Austria, Italy and the UK. N+P is the market leader in sludge and rejects. "We wouldn't have got so far, so fast, without N+P and its contacts in the paper industry, cement industry and power industry," admits Felten.
FoxFire is responsible for a paper company's rejects the moment they are loaded onto the truck at the mill. N+P hires the trucks and sorts out export and other licenses. "You can't imagine how much paperwork is involved in transporting waste," says Felten. For instance, FoxFire has to have an on-site archive of all documentation relating to the waste it brings in. "If a truck arrives without the paperwork, we don't call the paper company, we call N+P," the FoxFire MD adds.
It typically takes 30 minutes to unload one truck (21-22 tonnes) of rejects at the plant in Foxhol. The driver should be able to do this without assistance.
The paper mill rejects and other waste sources are pre-mixed (this is defined as treating waste and therefore requires a permit). After pre-mixing, the material goes into a reloader and a (Terex Atlas) crane transfers it to the pre-shredder (Lumago Bano).
Felten marvels at some of the strange items that are removed at the pre-shredding stage. "In October we found a hand grenade in the waste stream. We had to call the police. We get lots of golf balls as well."
Following pre-shredding, which mostly removes steel and stones, the material goes through a dewatering press. The average water content of paper industry rejects is 50%, but at some mills it as low as 40%, at others as high as 60%.
The material next passes through one of two shredders before a transportation screw transports it into a hopper. The transportation screw has a magnet to remove steel objects and a high-frequency magnet (supplied by Bakker Magnetics) for non-ferrous metals. "We generate two tonnes of steel per eight-hour shift," notes Felten. Some 90% of the steel is removed after shredding. The magnets are even able to remove paper clips. The retrieved metal is sold as scrap. "It has a positive value," says Felten.
The hopper acts as a buffer before the drying stage. The moisture content of the material is measured before and after drying (this information is cross-checked with measurements in the lab, as is the input weight of the material and its weight after the dewatering press).
The material is dried by means of a natural gas burner, followed by an Allgaier tumbling dryer. This is 22 m long with a 4.2 m diameter. The wet air is partly recirculated.
Conveyor belts-added because the process was generating more dust than expected-take the dry material to finished products storage.
The storage area consists of two silos with a combined capacity of 1,500-2,000 tonnes. Trucks are loaded with the final material directly from the silos. "FoxFire is set-up for just-in-time production, and what we produce we deliver the next day," explains Felten.
FoxFire designed the Foxhol plant, and Siemens built it on a turnkey basis. The German company's SIPAPER technology is the control system for the entire plant. "We could use a standard PCS 7, but we want to sell the FoxFire concept to paper mills," explains project and account manager, Siemens Pulp and Paper Industry, Jan Verhavert.
Siemens also provides remote diagnostics from its site in Brussels, as well as software that will allow Felten to run and monitor the plant from his laptop via UMTS (3G) while on the road. "There are only two guys running the plant at night, so we need all the help we can get," the MD explains.
In all, 10 people work for FoxFire. "That is the size I want for all our factories," says Felten. Having such a small staff means that everyone has to multi-task, including taking responsibility for cleaning. "The motto of the company is 'Everything has to be done'," the MD adds. "This means that we can operate 24 hours a day even when people are ill or on holiday."
The middleman adds value
FoxFire's end product, secondary fuel, is of particular interest to the cement industry. In Germany, for instance, cement works are powered by 85% secondary fuel, including used tires, bark and cooking oil. "A strong partnership between the pulp and paper industry and users of secondary fuel is important for both," believes Felten.
"What's important for the cement industry and power generation is the flying burning time -- the material has to completely burn within two seconds," he explains. According to the FoxFire chief, the company has achieved a stable heating value of 22-23 megaJ/kg. The final product contains around 40-60% plastic. Each fiber is 10-20 mm long.
According to Siemens's Verhavert, the paper industry needs an "in-between company" such as FoxFire because, to be economically viable, plants that process rejects into secondary fuel must be large-scale (at least 50,000 tonnes/yr capacity), which means taking rejects from many mills. However, rejects from different mills have different qualities. Some, for instance, have a very high chlorine content (because of the presence of high levels of PVC). These must be sorted with near-IR technology, which is too expensive for a small plant, says Felten. Conversely, he adds, rejects with a lot of fiber have a low heating value, which makes it unviable for a mill to have its own incinerator.
Waste incinerators in western Europe charge mills Euro 160-170 ($210-224) per tonne of rejects (plus transport costs). Often the rejects are rejected because they are too wet.
Although there is currently a glut of secondary fuel on the market in Germany leading to low prices (in fact cement works sometimes receive money for accepting deliveries rather than the other way round), Felten believes that prices and demand for secondary fuel will rise in the coming years. When that happens, the cost for mills of disposing of rejects will come down.
The Foxhol plant cost Euro 7 million in total, excluding startup costs. As well as the technical support of Siemens and investment from N+P, FoxFire has also received financial backing from S2 Beheer, a group of private investors, and NOM, the investment bank for the north Netherlands, whose role is to supply capital to startup companies. "We wouldn't have got this far without strategic alliances," says Felten.
Although FoxFire received a grant for starting a business in a region of high unemployment, there are no subsidies in Holland for processing waste. "A government grant is nice, but businesses have to be able to survive without grants," believes Felten. "Starting a business is like driving down a road with 150 traffic lights, where all 150 have to turn green before you get anywhere," he adds. "The most important thing is not the business plan and building a plant, it is having the right contacts: people with knowledge about environmental regulations, knowledge of local markets, and so on."
Look to the future
FoxFire has had enquiries from the US and Japan, but, says the MD, "Our focus is on mainland Europe." He would like to locate FoxFire's second plant on another shared brownfield plot, but "the next plant should be twice as big."
Verhavert says that, so far, most paper mills are not that interested in building their own rejects incinerators. "It is more likely that FoxFire will expand elsewhere in Europe and partner with mills." Siemens is hoping to share in this growth and also to explore synergies with its waste-to-energy knowhow by, for instance, building both a FoxFire plant and a CHP plant for a group of companies.
"The FoxFire solution is part of a chain and that chain is getting more and more important in the coming years," believes Felten. "Lots of mills are saying to us 'help us get rid of rejects'. With the FoxFire route, mills are not dependent on taxes and landfill costs."
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Capacity: 150,000 tonnes/yr
Storage of rejects and other raw materials -- 1,200 m²
Loading bay -- 400 m²
Factory floor space -- 1,600 m²
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