Serbia; The city of Belgrade chooses SUEZ and ITOCHU for a 25 year waste to energy project

Following an international tender, the consortium of SUEZ and ITOCHU has been selected for a 25-year PPP to develop a new system to treat the municipal waste of Belgrade. This project will allow to close and remediate one of the largest landfills still active in Europe, generate over 80 MW of renewable heat and electricity with a 340,000 tons p.a. energy-from-waste plant. The capital of Serbia will be up to European waste management standards.

On 29 September 2017, Mr Siniša Mali, Mayor of Belgrade and representatives of SUEZ and ITOCHU entered into the largest Public-Private Partnership ever signed in Serbia for the remediation of the Belgrade municipal waste landfill and the financing, construction and long-term operation of modern waste management facilities for the Serbian capital.

Under this agreement, SUEZ and ITOCHU’s 50/50 joint-venture will raise over €300m financing to build a 340,000 tons p.a. waste-to-energy facility with installed power production capacity of 25 MW and heat production capacity of 56 MW. In addition, a dedicated facility will process 200,000 tons of construction and demolition waste per year. Finally, a new waste disposal designed in accordance with European standards will dispose of residual waste pending the development of the recycling policy currently rolled out by City authorities.

Once the new facilities are available, the municipal landfill of Belgrade will be closed. The joint-venture will undertake the remediation and long-term aftercare of the 60 ha landfill – one of the 50 largest in the world1.

Following completion of construction managed by CNIM and Energoprojekt and planned in 2021, the facilities will be operated by SUEZ for a 25-year term.

The tender was organized by the City of Belgrade with the support of International Finance Corporation, the private finance institution of the World Bank Group.

SUEZ and ITOCHU are ideally positioned to undertake this project. SUEZ has an extensive experience with 40 million tons of waste managed annually in Europe and overseas, of which 7 million are recovered in 56 waste-to-energy facilities. SUEZ has been the first company to deliver a fully project-financed waste-to-energy facility in Central Europe under a PPP scheme, namely a 210,000 tons p.a. plant in Poznań (Poland) which started operation in 2016.

Together SUEZ and ITOCHU have an unrivalled track record of joint developments and investments in energy-from-waste projects in the UK, including the Merseyside, Cornwall, West London, and South Tyne Energy-from-Waste facilities, altogether processing approximately 1.3m tons of waste every year.

Upon signing the PPP Contract, Marie-Ange Debon, Senior Executive Vice-President of SUEZ in charge of International stated:

The Belgrade Waste PPP is a landmark and pathfinder project for a region which has huge investment needs in infrastructure, in particular in the environment sector. We are convinced that Public-Private Partnerships are among the best solutions to combine technical, financial and contractual performance and we are proud that the City of Belgrade selected us to bring the model to this part of Europe ,

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