Photo by: Real Invest Group
The principle of the circular economy itself can be described as an eco-technopark on a larger scale. The eco-technopark is a system that connects all interested parties by supply chains of MSW, goods and energy that are produced as a result of recycling.
In the Ecotechnopark, waste is processed and sorted, goods and fuel are produced, and energy is generated which is consumed by the Ecotechnopark’s residents. The whole system works as a closed cycle.
However, eco-technoparks in their full sense are not yet present in Russia. The closest to this format is “Technopark Real-Invest” in the Nizhniy Novgorod Region. But I do not know any more examples.
To attract investors to such a project one must guarantee the delivery of MSW to this recycling complex. For this it must be included in the territorial scheme which is not always of interest to the market players. Besides, such facility can appear only in an industrially developed region where there are enterprises interested in final recycling products and energy.
Take glass recycling, for example. In Russia, the share of glass waste in MSW is on average 10–15%. Therefore, in Russia today, it is still cheaper and easier to re-produce glass than to recycle waste into new glass.
Let’s imagine that an eco-technopark has generating capacity that would allow it to run on solid fuel. Firstly, the capital costs of the business to generate such capacity are not comparable to traditional generation. Interaction with energy monopolies is not easy to terminate overnight, even impossible when it comes to stable guaranteed generation. And it would be reckless, because joining a monopoly again, if something goes wrong, would be quite problematic.
But no one can guarantee stable waste-to-energy generation volumes: one waste morphology delivered today, another tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow your facility will be excluded from the territorial scheme, which means that the MSW will not be brought to you at all and you will not produce fuel and electricity.
This is why there are no such technoparks with “eco” prefix in Russia yet. There are too many buts that need to be foreseen and solved for that.
Cover photo: Real Invest Group
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