The European Investment Bank (EIB), the European Union's long-term financing institution, announces a EUR 50 million loan to Communauté Urbaine de Lille to part finance the construction of three new waste treatment and processing facilities.
The finance contracts were signed today in Lille by Mr Pierre Mauroy, Chairman of Lille Métropole Communauté Urbaine, and Philippe de Fontaine Vive, EIB Vice-President.
Firstly, this loan will go towards the construction of an organic urban waste processing facility in the communes of Sequedin and Loos, west of Lille city centre, and a sorting plant for the recycling of separately collected glass, paper and board, metal and plastic waste (45 000 tonnes/year) in the communes of Loos and Lille. The waste processing facility involves the construction of a large treatment plant (108 000 t/year) for the organic biowaste recovered by selective collection in the Lille conurbation. The anaerobic (without oxygen) fermentation of garden, kitchen and catering waste will produce compost and biogas that can be used as biofuel by part of the city's public bus fleet.
The project also comprises the construction of a transfer station for incinerable waste (260 000 t/year) beside the anaerobic treatment plant, which will make it possible to transport the various waste streams by barge on the Deûle canal between the organic waste processing facility and the waste incinerator in Halluin, to the north of the city.
This scheme will enable Communauté Urbaine de Lille to comply with national legislation, transposed from EU regulations, prohibiting the use of landfills for untreated municipal waste. It will contribute towards enhanced waste management through processing, rational energy use and, as a result, improved environmental protection. Recovering energy from biowaste and using it for transport purposes will help to reduce fossil fuel consumption and thus pollutant and CO2 emissions.
The EIB has provided finance for a number of projects in the Nord Pas de Calais region in the past, including the Communauté Urbaine de Lille's waste-to-energy processing plant in Halluin, the Centre Hospitalier d'Arras (Arras Hospital) and the Valenciennes tramway. The Bank has also promoted the region's economic development through several other operations, notably those in support of Sevelnord and Toyota in Valenciennes.
The aim of these loans is to protect and improve the environment. The EIB, the EU's financing institution, devotes one third of its lending to this objective within EU-25. In the past five years, this has amounted to nearly EUR 47 billion, of which EUR 3.7 billion in France. Under this heading, the EIB has granted EUR 7.7 billion in support of projects in the EU aimed at improving waste management and processing, the cleaning-up of sites and water quality. In France, the EIB has financed water management and/or waste treatment schemes in the conurbations of Belfort, Cergy-Pontoise, Chartres, Lille, Lyon, Melun, Nancy, Nantes and St Germain-en-Laye.