The European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Union's financing institution, is providing FRF 140  million (EUR 21.3 million (1)) to fund construction of a new urban waste processing and power generation plant in the district of Chartres. This loan will be made available to ORISANE, a company in the Lyonnaise des Eaux Group authorised to act as a public utility, via a banking consortium comprising Caisse Nationale de Crédit Agricole (CNCA) and Natexis Banque.

The project consists of building a new waste incineration facility with a nominal capacity of 110 000 tonnes per annum in Mainvilliers, west of Chartres. This new plant will meet the needs of seven municipalities with a total population of 300 000 in the Chartres area and replace the landfill sites and outdated incineration plants currently used to dispose of their waste. Besides bringing a marked improvement in environmental protection, the project will serve to optimise waste management by generating electricity. It complies with current French legislation, which stipulates that as from 2002 landfill sites can only be used for processed or final waste.

Since 1993, the EIB has contributed more than EUR 1.6 billion to waste processing infrastructure in the European Union. In France, it has helped to finance waste processing systems in the conurbations of Nancy, Nantes and Cergy-Pontoise, as well as funding with its global loans several hundred small and medium-scale environmental schemes implemented by local authorities.

This operation comes under the Amsterdam Special Action Programme (ASAP) set up by the EIB in mid-1997 to foster growth and employment in Europe.The purpose of ASAP, which will last three years, is to direct a substantial proportion of EIB lending towards projects in labour-intensive sectors (innovative SMEs, health, education, urban renewal), as well as to bolster the Bank's activity in the fields of environmental protection and trans-European networks.ASAP has now been fully operational Europe-wide for well over a year and has been deployed to finance the following investment:

• EUR 560 million approved for setting up some twenty venture capital operations concerning 11 EU countries, designed to strengthen the capital base of innovative SMEs, including, in France, operations targeting SOFARIS and CDC;
• EUR 125 million made available for management by the European Investment Fund (EIF) for creation of the European Technology Facility (ETF), an EU-wide umbrella fund which acquires participations in venture capital funds or companies specialising in providing equity finance for innovative SMEs. To date, the ETF has invested EUR 18.5 million in five venture capital funds in France, including one specialising in financing SMEs preparing for their stock market launch;
• EUR 2.9 billion approved for financing 23 projects or programmes in the fields of health and education concerning 14 EU countries, including, in France, funding for school infrastructure on the Island of Réunion and a global loan to Crédit Local de France for financing medium-scale schemes;
• EUR 3.8 billion approved for financing 24 urban renewal projects or programmes located in 9 EU countries, including, in France, a global loan to Crédit Local de France for financing medium-scale schemes, inter alia in the field of social housing;
• EUR 1.3 billion approved for some ten projects or programmes in the field of environmental protection, including, in France, a global loan to Crédit Agricole for financing schemes undertaken by SMEs in the area covered by the Agence de l'eau Seine-Normandie and the present operation.

Overall, ASAP is designed to increase the volume of EIB lending in these sectors by some EUR 10 billion over the period 1997-2000.

(1) EUR 1 = FRF 6.55957, GBP 0.705455, IEP 0.787564, USD 1.16675.