World’s Largest Waste to Energy Plant

World’s Largest Waste to Energy Plant will be built in Shenzhen, China. Design for waste to energy plant has been approved and two Danish architectural firms have won the competition to construct this modern facility for WTE plant. This will be a mega structure which will be used to generate energy/ electricity from waste treatment.

Total current population of Shenzhen city is estimated to be 20 Million. This proposed plant will have the capacity to incinerate one third of the total waste produced per day in the city. 5,000 tons of municipal waste will be burnt in this incineration plant on daily basis. Very first target of the construction company for this project is to build a safe and secure modern infrastructure and technical facility to deal with daily waste collected from the city. 

The building will not only produce energy from waste, but energy required for running the incinerators will also be generated from photovoltaic cells/ solar panels installed at circular roof of the building. For better aesthetics, landscape will be developed around the plant. This building will be constructed on modern techniques so that the plant offers best quality/ health standards for employees working there.

It is expected that the waste to energy plant will be completed till 2020 and it will be operational during same year. The plant does not only aim at producing energy from waste but engineers are of the view that an elevated walkway will be built inside building for education purpose of the visitors.
This is the real innovation that we always talk about. Rapid increase in population all over the world requires us to take such initiatives at city and country levels for treatment of waste for a useful purpose. Just like China, it is time for leaders and investors from other countries to start such projects of waste to energy because this project serves dual purpose:

1. It acts as a waste treatment plant
2. Energy is generated during treatment

I would like to recommend mechanical engineering students to take this project as a final year project idea at a small scale in their college/ university. Students can build smaller models of controlled incineration for generating energy/ hot water/ steam from water using incineration of waste.