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Finding a way to recycle incineration waste metals

Jaap Vanderhoek and Jella Sernee, founders of Inshco.

Photo: Pieter de Swart

When waste is burned in an incinerator, one-fifth of it is left over as “bottom ash.” Incineration companies have to pay to dump and store this bottom ash at waste disposal sites. That’s a financial burden on incineration firms, and a potentially hazardous burden on the environment. But one man’s ash is another man’s asset—and Jaap Vandehoek and Jelle Sernee, former students at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, are transforming this waste into marketable and eco-friendly raw materials. “We were educated as mining engineers, but if someone asks me what I do now, I say, ‘recycling process engineer,’” says Sernee.

Much of bottom ash consists of metals—copper, aluminum, zinc, iron, lead, tin and gold—which, if properly recovered, retain their value. Vandehoek and Sernee, together with their former professor, are perfecting a technology that sorts out these precious metals for recycling into construction materials. Incineration firms pay Vandehoek and Sernee for the recycling services, sell the recovered metals to the contruction industry and voila, a waste stream becomes a revenue stream. Vandehoek and Sernee’s company, Inashco, opened its first plant in the southern part of the Netherlands, this year. But for the two recycling process engineers, that’s just the beginning. They are in talks with incinerator companies in Germany, France, Denmark, Poland and Belgium about building more and bigger plants. “Each year, the European market alone produces 20 million tons of bottom ash,” Sernee says. “That’s huge.”