3WM Waste-to-Bioenergy Process
The 3WM waste-to-bioenergy process allows us to value things that are not valued today through the combination of several proven innovations and patented technologies.
Input: Waste Collection, Sorting, and Treatment
+ Dry materials: sorting and separation of dry materials (plastic, paper, wood, etc.) through infrared, X-ray technology
+ Organic waste: sorting and separation of organic materials from packaging and other solid materials (organic matter for anaerobic digestion and shredded dry plastic)
+ Medical waste: treatment of medical and hospital waste (result: shredded plastic waste)
Output: Transformation of Pre-Treated Waste
+ Bioenergy: transformation of plastic waste into bioenergy (electricity, biodiesel, biogas, calorific, etc.)
+ Fertilizer: treatment of organic matter thought the methanization process
+ Recovery: recovery of materials with market value (naphtha, parafine, carbon, etc.)
3WM tokens will allow us to monetize waste collection and buy green energies issued through the 3WM® technological solutions.
Plastic Waste
Plastic is very common in our everyday lives. Plastic waste is littering our cities, oceans, and waterways and contributing to health problems for humans and animals. There is a lot of waste, and it is difficult to recycle.
Depending on the composition of the plastic waste, it will require between 10 and 1,000 years to be fully decomposed. Over time, plastic breaks down into tiny particles called microplastics, which are found on shorelines around the world. Moreover, the average cost for plastic incineration in Europe is estimated to be between €50 and €150 per ton.
Plastic waste is damaging our ecosystem. According to the University of California’s report, almost eight million metric tons of plastic end up in the world’s oceans annually. The plastic waste thrown into seas every year can kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures.
Plastic is produced worldwide in huge quantities, and production has increased every year since World War II, as described below (cf. Worldwide Plastic Production from 1950 to 2015). In 2015, 448 million tons of plastic were produced worldwide. At the European level, there was also an increase in plastic production in 2017 of 7.3% (64.4 million tons) more than that in 2016 (60 million tons).
Recycling rates steadily increased in Europe by 79% from 2006 to 2016. In 2016, the recycling rate in Europe was 31%, but 27.3% of post-consumer waste was sent to landfills. In Europe, several countries have already banned landfills and are applying higher recycling rates. However, in 2016, the amount of plastic packaging sent to landfills in the EU was around 3.5 million tons. If we consider this quantity as an available input for our process, we could create a market value of more than €1 billion per year, considering the current price of fossil fuels.
The problem with plastic is not the plastic itself. Rather, it’s the lack of local recycling infrastructure to deal with all end-of-life plastic and concerted support for environmental plastic clean-up. Moreover, there is an absence of incentivization for people to recycle used plastic properly. 3WM® and its partners have developed patented technologies that allow them to transform plastic waste into a full range of energies, such as biofuel, gasoline, electricity, and calorific.
3WM transforms plastic waste into bioenergy. Our plastic waste transformation technologies turn any type of plastic (except PVC) into bioenergy, such as electricity, biodiesel, biogas, and calorific, with high efficiency. We use an innovative, continuous process that produces no pollution or uses any external energy. Our technologies allow us to transform up to 92.5%all non-recyclable plastics with efficiency (the remaining 7.5% being reusable materials specifically for the building industry).
The default structure of our process allows us to transform 20,000 tons of plastic waste per year into bioenergy. However, the configuration of our plants is adapted to the size of the available waste deposits. Many smaller or larger solutions exist.
Plastic-to-Bioenergy Process
Input: Plastic Waste
+ Sorting and separation of dry materials (plastic, paper, wood, etc.) through infrared X-ray technology
+ Shredding plastic
Output: Transformation of Pre-Treated Waste
+ Bioenergy: transformation of plastic waste into bioenergy (electricity, biodiesel, biogas, calorific, etc.)
+ Recovery of materials with market value (naphtha, parafine, carbon, etc.)
Organic Waste
Organic waste is another common problem many countries in the world are struggling to solve. According to the World Bank, global organic waste will reach one billion tons by the year 2025, making up around 46% of the total waste produced. The global cost of disposing of organic waste was $94 billion in 2010 and is projected to increase to $172 billion by 2025.
Landfills are not the best disposal options for this type of waste, especially because food is broken down into methane, a greenhouse gas that is 23 times stronger than carbon dioxide. Moreover, many landfill sites, especially those in poor countries, are poorly managed, creating toxic leachates that poison the soil and water underneath. The situation is no better in many developed countries. Forty percent of food in the US is uneaten and, therefore, thrown away.
3WM owns modern, advanced technologies designed to transform organic waste into a biomass substrate to be used in our biogas plants to produce energy.
3WM Retreats Organic Waste
Our technology is a patented reprocessing system for organic recyclables, such as kitchen waste, raw organic waste, industrial batches, expired bulk products, opened and unpackages, and tubes or cans. We supply bespoke systems, including dump trucks, bunkers, conveyor systems, and the worldwide-patented separator hammer mill.
Our system collects and transforms large quantities of organic waste. The waste is destroyed and separated into biomass and foreign matter, such as cutlery, plastic, sheet metal, and other extraneous substances. The biomass is pumped into a tank, where it is stored until it is sucked.
Experience has shown that disposal costs can be significantly reduced. One module is suitable for waste quantities greater than or equal to 5 m³ per day.
3WM turns household waste into methane biogas. Our technology is a compact solution for energy recovery from organic waste in a discontinuous, dry process. The device is composed of two to seven digesters that produce biogas from dry organic waste and a system for collecting and distributing percolate to different digesters. The processing, storage, and recovery of the biogas produced during digestion accumulate in the cloudy sky of the digesters. The extracted biogas is driven by a closed system of buried piping to remove the water contained in the biogas. Then, it is stored in a gas-bag-type gasometer to ensure the continuity of operation of the CHP. The CHP converts the biogas into heat energy (to heat the digesters) and electrical energy.
Our technology is a standard methanization, 45 m3 volume plant ready for use to power a 10–50 kW electric and fully automated facility to produce electricity and hot water from waste.
Medical Waste
Disposing of medical waste is a huge global challenge facing both first- and third-world countries. Developed countries are overcome with large amounts of medical waste resulting from the use of disposable items. In contrast, developing countries are dealing with the crisis of sorting and disposing of the waste cleanly.
Hospitals in the US discard over two million tons of waste per year. Moreover, according to a study by Anesthesia & Analgesia, a busy hospital in a first-world country can emit as much gas annually as a 100–1,200 cars, depending on the form of anesthetic used (a gaseous form of medical waste). Additionally, many third-world countries, such as Eritrea, Lesotho, and Ghana, have no legislation for healthcare waste management.
3WM has decided to step in with its innovative, patented, state-of-the-art medical waste disposal technologies to reduce this medical waste expansion.
3WM Disinfects Medical Waste
Our patented technology is designed to disinfect or sterilize infectious healthcare waste, as well as treat all liquids in the contaminated waste (blood, urine, dialysis) by sterilizing them in specific tanks incorporated into the machine.
The waste to be treated can be delivered in tanks of 660 liters or 1,100 liters. We can adapt our grip to receive several types of containers. These containers are filled with plastic or single-use cardboard containers or plastic bags that will be dumped into the treatment facility by a lifting and tilting system.
Before opening the lid, the air and aerosols in the filling chamber are sucked up and treated by a filtering installation. This step prevents the infecting particles contained in the receiving hopper from being emitted into the atmosphere. The sucked air is purified in the filter installation and released them into the atmosphere.
Main Characteristics
+ Unique, patented continuous-pressure process
+ Economic thermal process without the use of chemical disinfectants
+ Safe and reproducible results in the field of microbiology
+ Transformation of hazardous waste into neutral and unidentifiable waste
+ Significant volume reduction — no emissions or residue
+ High security thanks to automatic operation of the installation
