The City of Amsterdam will probably launch a second sales process for its waste management company Afval Energie Bedrijf (AEB) at the beginning of next year. Extensive research into the sale had been carried out in recent months. As a result of that analysis, the municipal executive had decided to sell AEB along with the company's waste sorting plant, explained Reinier van Dantzig, the alderman responsible for municipal shareholdings in a press release issued on Friday.
AEB operates a waste to energy (wte) plant with a treatment capacity of around 1.4 million tonnes per year. A sorting plant with a capacity of around 60,000 tonnes of waste per year went into operation in 2017. The facility separates recyclable materials from residual municipal waste before incineration.
The company ran into financial difficulties in 2019 following technical problems and a shutdown at its waste to energy plant, which saw several incineration lines out of service for several months. In the wake of these difficulties, the city of Amsterdam had made an initial attempt to sell the waste incineration plant operator. The scope of that proposed sale had excluded the waste sorting plant.
In mid-December 2021, a sales agreement was concluded with a subsidiary of the Dutch utility AVR. However, this completion of the transaction was barred by the Dutch competition authority, which concluded in its review of the deal that in light of the substantial market shares already held by the waste management companies "too powerful a company would have emerged" had they been allowed to merge....
