CNBC Business | Muck and brass

Muck and brass

Tom Stevenson looks at Thenergo, a French firm that’s making energy out of bio-waste

What have potato peelings, chicken manure and the filthy sludge left over by paper manufacturers got in common? Answer: they are all raw materials for the hottest new theme in sustainability, waste-to-energy power generation.

When Lamaire, a Belgian potato producer, delivered truckloads of spuds to big customers like chip maker McCain, it used to return with empty vehicles while its customers chucked tonnes of potato peelings into incinerators.

Today, thanks to a partnership with Thenergo, a recently floated former subsidiary of French wind power company Theolia, Lamaire charges its customers for removal of a full load of potato waste. Back at base it ferments the peelings to create methane, in turn generating heat and power at its private combined heat and power plant.

Some of the energy is used by Lamaire, and some is sold on to the grid. That’s not the end of this “money for old rope” trick, however, because the fermented peelings are then turned into fertiliser. There’s a financial return at every step of the process where before there was only waste.

The partnership with Lamaire is just one example of Antwerp-based Thenergo’s bid to literally make money out of a load of old rubbish. Others include a deal with a paper mill in which the dirty water and pulp produced during recycling is fed with bacteria to generate methane.

The company has arrangements with local communities in the Netherlands to generate heat and power from the wood chippings cut from parks and tree-lined avenues, and it’s tapping into the 800,000 tonnes of chicken manure produced each year in Belgium and the 1.2 million tonnes generated in Holland.

Founded in 2002, Thenergo floated on Alternext, Euronext’s junior arm, in June. It raised €70m and is now capitalised at around €120m, one of the leading players in the still-fledgling waste-to-energy sector. Recently it used its new stock market paper currency to acquire Leysen Invest, a Belgian group specialising in the procurement of organic waste and the logistics of waste collection, sorting, treatment and processing. Thenergo chief executive Kurt Alen said the deal gave Thenergo “immediate strategic acceleration, coming at a time when organic waste and its associated markets are increasingly recognised by governments and investors as a powerful environmental alternative to wind and solar”.

Thenergo makes money at every stage of the waste-to-energy process. It designs, builds, finances and operates the combined heat and power plants on behalf of its partners – typically small agricultural or industrial customers in Belgium and the Netherlands. Although still loss-making, Thenergo is betting on waste-to-energy remaining at the forefront of sustainable power generation. As the old English adage has it: “Where there’s muck, there’s brass.” EB