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Customer Application

28 March 2019

By the Region, for the Region: an Innovative Natural Resource Recovery System

Cows, steers, pigs: The Borken district is a rural area, and the animals deposit important nutrients. However, the West Münsterland region does not have enough acreage for releasing the liquid manure on fields for its nutrients. Nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium salts can be recovered from liquid manure – so it’s a shame to waste it. What to do? Doris Nienhaus, CEO of NDM Naturwerkstoffe GmbH in Velen, had an innovative idea in 2013, the likes of which the world had never seen before. 90 farmers from the Borken region and the new TOPJOB^® S Rail-Mount Terminal Block with lever from WAGO were there too.

Intelligent Resource Recovery

In the Borken district of North Rhine-Westphalia, you need to drive over 250 km to properly dispose of surplus liquid manure. That’s the same as the distance from Hanover to Berlin. About 1,000,000 m³ of surplus liquid manure occurs. And the transport costs for disposal continue to rise. That is a real challenge. Doris Nienhaus, managing director of NDM Naturwerkstoffe GmbH in Velen, had an exciting idea: “From liquid manure, we can recover valuable materials that can be recycled, in the form of methane and nitrogen. We want to do that on our own premises, with a unique natural resource recovery system.” A total of 90 farmers from the Borken district are limited partners in the system. The idea came into being at the end of 2014. The multi-stage (mechanical–biological–thermal–chemical) process recovers marketable products from the phosphorous and nitrogen compounds in the liquid manure, leaving no material flows that would be environmentally harmful or require disposal. As a side effect, the system can use almost all the (electrical and thermal) energy generated in the process itself, covering 90 % of the overall system’s energy consumption during normal operation. Subsidies are used to develop environmental technologies, with the support of researchers, which will be tested on site under real operating conditions. The concept is unique.