A waste incineration plant becomes a modern center for resources and energy ZRE

A modern waste treatment center is being built on the site of the former Stellinger Moor waste incineration plant in the Bahrenfeld district: the Center for Resources and Energy, or ZRE for short.

Construction of the special civil engineering works has already started in May 2022. Now, on February 8, the contract for the construction of the buildings was signed by the representatives of ZRE, Stadtreinigung Hamburg and the ZRE Stellingen joint venture, consisting of the partners Wayss & Freytag Ingenieurbau, Matthäi Bauunternehmen and Heitkamp Industrial Solutions.

In this joint venture, Matthäi will take over the commercial management and Wayss & Freytag the technical management. Heitkamp Industrial Solutions GmbH will provide technical support for this project and assist the purchasing department in awarding contracts for the complex trades. The main focus will be on maintaining and adjusting the schedules. In addition, the technical office of Heitkamp Industrial Solutions will develop the slipforming concepts and support the elaboration of an acceleration concept in order to keep the resulting delays as short as possible.

The Center for Resources and Energy (ZRE for short) is the forward-looking project for the sustainable recycling of municipal waste of the city of Hamburg. By 2025, a complex will be built at the Hamburg Stellingen site, with five sub-plants for the material and thermal recycling of household waste, biowaste and green waste.

After commissioning, the ZRE is expected to treat around 323,000 metric tons of waste per year, including around 145,000 metric tons of household waste.

This is what makes the ZRE so special.

Directly upon delivery, a distinction is made between three waste fractions, each of which is dumped in separate bunker areas:

• High calorific waste or also substitute fuels e.g. industrial surpluses such as plastic cuttings
• Low calorific waste e.g. waste wood or leaves
• Household waste

The ZRE thus supplies more than 40,000 households with electricity and around 39,000 households with heat per year.

By combining the different processes - sorting and thermal treatment - at one site, a significant increase in the recycling rate can be achieved while avoiding intermediate transports. The plant is so flexible that up to 75 MW of district heating can be extracted in winter and up to 23 MW of electrical power in summer. The energy generated will be fed seasonally into the city's district heating and electrical distribution networks. In addition, 5 MW of heat will be recovered year-round from the warm exhaust gas streams of the two combustion lines and fed into a local heating network.

The ZRE thus supplies more than 40,000 households with electricity and around 39,000 households with heat per year.

In this project, Heitkamp Industrial Solutions again demonstrates its commitment and expertise in handling energy-sustainable projects and thus contributes to the energy turnaround and the conversion to a climate-neutral economy.