Restart of Knowaste abandoned

Archiv – The curtain has come down on Knowaste for good. Further efforts to restart the installation at the diaper recycling site in Arnhem, The Netherlands, are pointless because work on dismantling started this week. The Netherlands | The curtain has come down on Knowaste for good. Further efforts to restart the installation at the diaper recycling site in Arnhem, The Netherlands, are pointless because work on dismantling started this week.
According to a bidding consortium of three Dutch parties, after the auction of the Knowaste process facility on 17 December 2007 there was an unexpectedly lengthy period of negotiation, during which the prospects of a restart ranged from very rosy to almost hopeless.
During this period the consortium (EMT-project, Synthese advisory group and Royal Haskoning) behind trying to restart nappy recycling did everything it could to make as attractive an offer as possible in order to get a restart off the ground.
In the end the consortium’s investor told the official receiver that they were prepared to up their bid by 15%. But on 3 January 2008 it was decided that the Knowaste installation would become the property of a single Belgian bidder whose objective was to dismantle it. Afterwards it emerged that the victorious bid was only 2.6% higher than the original bid by the investor who wanted to restart the facility.
In view of the fact that the Belgian bidder had already started dismantling the unit, the consortium’€™s investor had to decide on 14 January 2008 to stop any further activity. This means the end of an environmentally beneficial processing technology and the loss of jobs, and it also possibly puts an end to an efficient collection infrastructure, the consortium says.
The diaper collection system has suffered from the termination of Knowaste. Collection companies, local authorities and processors are all currently reviewing their options against the backdrop of the current problems.