After not quite two years of construction and the successful startup using gas as a fuel, the third line of the incinerator was put to the first hands-on test on 2 December 2009.

“Advent 2009 brought a particularly exciting moment for EVN Abfallverwertung and its staff: the first fire on the grate of the newly built third line of the thermal waste utilisation plant”, commented plant manager Gernot Alfons. “It’s like the first time you fire up a newly installed fireplace at home: you are itching to know whether it will work out nicely. We have one of the largest incineration grates in the world: it has a width of 11 metres and it will fire 225,000 metric tons of garbage per year.” The first firing-up involves actual waste being fed into the chute and from there onto the grate for the first time. This is the moment when designers see whether the waste will spread equally across the entire width of the grate, whether the system will evenly heat up to a sufficient temperature, whether the burn-up rate is adequate and, of course, whether the flue gas cleaning system does its work, so that the pollutants are properly precipitated and the emission limits are observed.

It was a good start to the Christmas period: the third line was successfully launched on its purpose of incinerating garbage. By the end of February 2010, some 30,000 tons of waste had already been incinerated on Line 3.