First African waste-to-energy plant gives Ethiopia breath of fresh air

Sun Zhongpeng, operations and maintenance manager at CNEEC, said the power plant has an annual capacity of 185 gigawatts.

Sun said the plant receives 1,800 tons of waste per day from across Addis Ababa and incinerates 1,400-1,500 tons daily, generating over 600 megawatts of power.

He said the leachate water is treated for recycling. Each day they treat 100-200 tons of leachate water, and plans are underway to pipe the water to the local community for irrigation purposes.

To completely eliminate scavenging, Ethiopian Electric Power plans to give bottom ash, a solid by-product of the incineration process, to neighboring communities for use as a building material.

Currently, the plant employs 60 Chinese staff and 45 permanent Ethiopian staff who are in on-the-job training and about 30 temporary staff, Sun said.

Sun said delegates from other African countries have been visiting the power plant, and many have expressed interest in having similar projects in their countries.

"We are currently in discussion with Egypt to construct a similar facility in the country. We look forward to doing similar projects in African countries along the Belt and Road Initiative," Sun said, adding they have constructed similar facilities in China and Thailand.

Waste incineration is popular in Europe, where nearly one quarter of all municipal solid waste is incinerated. France alone has 126 waste-to-energy plants, while Germany has 121 and Italy 40.