Vanheede Environment Group

At Picanol's Ypres site, waste used to be handled by whoever had a forklift free, so nobody could say whether the plant complied with the law, paid the right price or how to split costs between departments. Since October 2009, Vanheede has run all waste streams under Total Waste Care: about 60 streams are sorted at source, two Vanheede men-on-site move some 1,000 small bins and 200 large ones to the recycling area, compact waste to cut trips and report every month, so costs can be broken down per department. Foundry sand from Proferro is handled separately and reused as construction material.

The residue left after Belgium's five PMD sorting centres still contains around 30 to 40% recyclable material, which used to go to incineration. Under a five-year contract with Fost Plus, Vanheede post-sorts around 35,000 tonnes of this residue a year from 2025. A new mixed industrial waste facility in Rumbeke, with a capacity of 100,000 tonnes, separates the real residue from the recyclables, then the existing PMD sorting line splits them into eight material flows for recycling. Vanheede invested 35 million euros in the project.

Fluvius, the Flemish grid operator, needed a waste policy that matched how the company is organised, and reporting it could rely on. Vanheede redrew the specifications around Fluvius' structure, giving a clear overview of the number and weight of containers along with improvement proposals. The team now uses myVanheede to check legal compliance and to file its annual environmental report, instead of spreadsheets that were always a month behind, and its health and safety committee and works council use the yearly waste volumes. Fluvius also piloted the Vanheede Plus app for on-the-spot collection requests.

• Clear overview of containers and weights per site
• Near real-time data for the annual environmental report
• Goal to keep one more stream out of residual waste each year

Colruyt Group owns farmland in Belgium and wants to keep it fertile without chemical fertiliser. Vanheede Biomass Solutions ferments Colruyt Group's organic waste at Quévy and returns it as digestate, a certified organic fertiliser. In one spring it delivered more than 1,000 m³ of digestate, spread on Colruyt Group's fields in Hainaut, closing the loop between the retailer's waste and its own crops.

• Organic waste returned to farmland instead of being disposed of
• Chemical fertiliser replaced by a certified organic product

The Puyenbroeck provincial estate covers 450 hectares and welcomes 450,000 visitors a year, with play areas, a campsite, golf and events, which makes sorting at source a real challenge. With Vanheede collecting its streams, the estate gave clear responsibilities to its staff, put a PMD bin next to every residual waste bin and added oil, fat and glass bins where needed. Each year PMD volumes rise and residual waste falls.

The University of Mons used to work with three companies, each collecting a different stream, which meant three times the follow-up and reporting. In a public tender that included quality criteria, it chose Vanheede for all streams from October 2018: PMD, paper and cardboard, residual waste, glass, wood, food and green waste across 40 buildings. Staff on each campus see the collection calendar directly in myVanheede, so the housing department no longer has to go through the environmental manager.