Zeevaart

“This is the first phase of our developments at Maasvlakte,” says Carlos Rodriguez, one of the founders of AGRO Merchants Group. “We expect to double our capacity over the next two years.” According to Rodriguez, the new warehouse will also strengthen the position of the group’s other locations in the Netherlands (Coldstore Wibaco, Coldstore Urk, Harthoorn Logistics, Europe Total Logistics, Opticool and ADB Cool Company).

The new ‘Temperature-Controlled Storage Facility’ will include an integrated inspection post for the inspection of imports from non-European countries. The inspection post has been designed according to the very latest standards, in close collaboration with the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA). The existing inspection post at Coldstore Wibaco will be taken out of operation.

AGRO Merchants Group owns and operates 53 locations in eight countries in Europe, North America and Latin America, which offer over 700,000 m² of cold storage space.

The DFDS ferry freight services across the North Sea still represent 34% of its entire business. The volumes increased by 10 per cent in 2015, partly due to the improving British economy. The Rotterdam routes did even better: Felixstowe +12.2% and Immingham: +12.9%. “This is a strong increase in relation to 2014. For this reason, DFDS had to shift its ships at various moments throughout the year in order to meet the demand for capacity on the various routes in the Baltic and the North Sea,” said Mikael Mortensen, Route Director for Rotterdam–UK. There are around 25 sailings each week from Rotterdam.

2015 was altogether a record year for DFDS. The turnover of the DFDS Group grew by 5% to around 1.8 billion euros.

Source: DFDS

It’s a shame actually: the existing, mechanical method used to recycle discarded PET bottles, packaging, polar fleece and trainers doesn’t allow us to remove the colours out of the plastic. As a result, PET waste is currently unsuited for high-grade, circular re-use. This means that coloured PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, needs to be ‘downcycled’ or incinerated. But this is about to change. Ioniqa, a spin-off of TU Eindhoven and the Dutch Polymer Institute, has discovered the key to producing an ‘eternal PET bottle’: a process in which PET waste of all types and colours can be endlessly recycled into pure feedstock. This raw material is suited for any application that requires new PET. And… in terms of price and quality, the recycled PET is comparable to material from fossil sources.

InnovatieLink
After this breakthrough, Ioniqa quickly faced a whole range of new challenges. Having completed all these experiments, the firm had to find a test location with the right facilities to scale up its research. One of the parties that it approached in this context was InnovatieLink, an organisation that helps innovative entrepreneurs to connect to knowledge, funding and facilities within the Chemical and Energy sectors. “Companies are looking for partners in dialogue who know what they are talking about. This allows us to accelerate the innovation process,” explains InnovatieLink innovation manager Sina Salim. “When Tonnis Hooghoudt, the CEO of Ioniqa, approached us with this question, I immediately presented the specifications to various open chemical innovation centres that we are in close touch with.”

Plant One Rotterdam
In a follow-up to these contacts, Ioniqa recently set up at Plant One Rotterdam – with the support of the Port of Rotterdam Authority and the Municipality. Here, the company is currently constructing a 1,000-litre facility that will allow it to test its circular process on a large scale. Plant One provides innovative entrepreneurs with the space they need to work on new sustainability developments. To this end, a number of sites in the Botlek area are made available for testing pilot facilities that are too large for the firm’s own laboratory. At Plant One, Ioniqa is able to take the recycling of PET waste to the next level.

Ioniqa and Plant One
Plant One Managing Director Gabriël Tschin talks about the partnership: “Ioniqa contacted me because they wanted to scale up.” The start-up is presently working together with Plant One on the construction of a new facility. “We developed a proposal as to what the facility should look like, which we used as a point of departure for joint engineering. Right now, we’re still in the middle of construction, but we hope to make the first test runs by the end of the month.” In other words, we still have to wait a bit longer to see how the 1,000-litre facility works in practice. If the tests are successful, Ioniqa can move straight on to the next phase: the financing for scaling up operations to 10 kilotonnes has already been secured.

The two SGT5-8000H gas turbines started their journey in the Westhafen in Berlin, where they were loaded on board the inland vessel MS ‘Niedersachsen’. The journey then continued to Rotterdam where the heavy cargo, weighing 890 tons, more than three times the weight of an Airbus A380, was loaded on board the heavy lift ship ‘Anne Sofie’. From Rotterdam, the ship will sail via the Strait of Gibraltar to the Mediterranean Sea. The freight will reach Adabiya on the Red Sea via the Suez Canal. Further transportation will take place with the assistance of a 40-axle trailer, which will cover the distance of 250 kilometres along the Nile to Beni Suef in approximately five days.

A total of eight such gas turbines will be installed in the Beni Suef steam and gas power plant. With an installed capacity of around 4.8 Gigawatts, it will become the largest combined cycle plant in the world. In this way, it can supply around 21.6 million people with electricity. “It is expected that the plant in Beni Suef will be feeding electricity into the Egyptian power grid as early as the winter of 2016/2017”, said Willi Meixner, CEO of the Power and Gas Division of Siemens.

Source: Siemens

Starting as a freight forwarder in 1983, D.M.I. presently specialises in sea cargo and air freight, haulage, warehousing, distribution and handling customs formalities on behalf of its clients, including companies in the Chemical sector. As such, the acquisition effectively complements Broekman’s existing range of one-stop-shop solutions. “This acquisition is good news for everyone involved,” says Raymond Riemen, CEO of Broekman Logistics. “And first and foremost for our clients, who we can now offer even better service thanks to the expansion of our warehousing facilities by some 10,000 m².”

Established over 55 years ago in the port of Rotterdam, Broekman Logistics has developed into a full-service logistics service provider with some 800 employees and locations in the Netherlands, China, India, Singapore, Belgium, Poland and the Czech Republic. According to the group, the recent acquisition further strengthens its position as market leader (260,000 m² in the Benelux region).