Before waste can be reused, it first needs to be sorted. This happens at the waste-sorting plant known as Twence Afvalscheiding (TAS).

Construction and demolition debris forms one of the Netherlands’ largest waste streams. In tonnage, it even amounts to well over twice the amount of household waste produced each year. By carefully sorting and recycling construction and demolition debris, those materials do not need to be disposed of at a high cost. These days, the bulkier and often heavier kinds of debris (e.g. rubble, metals and wood) are already sorted for the most part at the source: on the building site itself. From there, they are transported directly to specialised companies.

TAS focuses primarily on sorting the remaining, lighter waste streams, such as paper, plastics and films. Besides construction and demolition debris, the TAS plant also processes dry industrial waste and oversized household waste. These activities fit in with the growing tendency to promote the recycling of waste by sorting it in advance.

The TAS sorting plant divides the waste into various different substreams such as metals, wood, rubble, sand and high-caloric waste. Various different customers can use (or reuse) those waste substreams as raw materials. High-caloric waste is suited, among other things, for the further production of secondary fuels. The TAS plant has a capacity of some 120,000 tonnes of waste per year.

Twence B.V. and Rouwmaat Groenlo B.V set up the company Twence Afvalscheiding B.V. as a joint venture in 2002. At the close of 2006, Rouwmaat and Twence decided by arrangement that Twence should assume full ownership of TAS in order to enable the further integration of the waste-sorting plant into the complete Twence operations.