8/8 Amsterdam west WWTP

Wei Tseng
Wei Tseng
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Father’s day in Taiwan today but isn’t celebrated in the Netherlands! Interestingly Synco, the engineer that shows us around in Amsterdam west wastewater treatment plant today has a daughter share same English name with me!

Amsterdam west is the largest wastewater treatment plant in the Netherlands, the capacity is one million people equivalents per day. The location is just right next to incineration plant which makes a good business between the two plant. The biogass produced by the wwtp can be used in operating the generator and the heat from incineration plant has it second life in heat exchanger to speed up digestion and heat up the building.

In Amsterdam west, they recover the struvite (magnesium, phosphate compound ) in order to decrease water content and increase soil content, in the other word, make the sludge as light as could since the incineration price is really high (80 euros/ton). Seemingly, the reason of retrieving these struvite isn’t for earning money from it, instead saving the expand of treating the sludge is more emphasis.

Synco is a really nice guy,spending whole his afternoon time explaining the thinking behind designation of the wwtp, the problem they faced and how they fixed, their new plan of upgrading the business..etc. Nice to talk to someone with so much passion in his own job and so much knowledge!

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