AVN was established in 1984, as a joint subsidiary of the State of Lower Austria and EVN, with a view to solving the waste dumping problem. Looking far into an ecological future, the State of Lower Austria had decided to tackle the problem of landfills that constitute a hazard to the environment, long before the overall Austrian ordinance governing landfills entered into force.

AVN came up with the solution: incineration of household, bulk and industrial waste, combined with the generation of electricity and district heating, underpinned by ecological logistics based on rail transport. In 1999, AVN became a full subsidiary of EVN. Since 2004, it has been incinerating more than 300,000 metric tons of garbage a year. Enlargement by a third line was begun in July 2007, so that by early 2010 its output will have increased from its current 120 MW to 210 MW, through the incineration of about 500,000 metric tons of waste per year. The energy yielded by all that waste will allow the Dürnrohr power station to reduce its fuel consumption by 100,000 metric tons of coal and 10 million cubic metres of natural gas per year.

In order to visibly document this ecologically future-proof combination of waste incinerator and power plant and to integrate the thermal waste utilisation plant in the totality of EVN facilities at the Zwentendorf location, the name of the company was changed from AVN to EVN Abfallverwertung Niederösterreich GmbH on 16 June 2009.