AnaeCo eyes transformational strategy

ANAECO chief Patrick Kedemos believes the waste industry is set to undergo a profound, technological shift in the next 20 years comparable to the rapid advances in telecommunications since the advent of the mobile phone.

It’s a bold prediction but Mr Kedemos has big plans for AnaeCo and its Western Australian-made DiCOM waste processing technology.

Construction is currently under way on an expansion to AnaeCo’s first resource recovery and bioconversion plant in Shenton Park; and the listed technology group last week made public a memorandum of understanding with Transpacific Cleanaway to deploy a DiCOM system at one of Transpacific’s facilities on the east coast.

The $35 million Shenton Park plant is AnaeCo’s showcase facility. It was commissioned by the Western Metropolitan Regional Council, which is an alliance of the towns of Claremont, Cottesloe, Mosman Park, the Chire of Peppermint Grove and the City of Subiaco.

The DiCOM technology converts the organic component of household waste into compost and biogas in an enclosed facility.

The expansion of the plant will increase its processing capacity to about 55,0000 tonnes a year, and on completion in the middle of 2012 AnaeCo is confident it will have entered into a number of memorandums of understanding with companies and governments.

“This will effectively launch an initial stream of other facilities; that is the first phase of the development of the company, having half a dozen projects happening simultaneously in different countries,” Mr Kedemos said.

Ultimately, Mr Kedemos said his ambition was to build a sufficient number of plants and a track record that would allow it to focus on licensing its technology rather than simply building facilities.

“We are not a building company or a company with a vocation to operate those plants, we might do it at the beginning but we are a technology company,” Mr Kedemos said.

“And this is why I want to be building a technology transfer platform from which we will effectively be licensing our technology to a number of governments and waste management companies.”

Mr Kedemos is confident this shift in focus from developing plants to licensing the DiCOM technology would herald a much faster wave of expansion and potentially catch the eye of one of the global waste giants.

“In three to seven years, precisely as the world moves en masse to this way of dealing with waste, one of the 800-pound gorillas may put its hand up to buy us,” Mr Kedemos said.

“The two 800-pound gorillas in the industry are Veolia and SITA, two French companies.”

It’s an ambitious expansion strategy but Mr Kedemos, who only joined AnaeCo in July, is looking well beyond the financial pressures that have beset the company as it proceeds with its first commercial-scale plant.

The Former Air Liquide WA general manager and French native said AnaeCo was one of only a handful of WA companies with the capacity to grow into a truly international technology business.

And in contrast to his predecessor and company founder Tom Rudas, Mr Kedemos is focused on engaging with the media and investment communities to share the AnaeCo story.

“Our business is one of the few examples of a business in Perth that really has the potential to be a global one,” Mr Kedemos said.

“What really attracted me to AnaeCo was the potential to scale the business globally and be in a position where we could make deals and (form) partnerships on several continents and that is beyond strictly speaking the waste side of the story.”

AnaeCo has already struck a joint venture agreement with Singapore’s Sindicatum Sustainable Resources to market the DiCOM technology in Asia.

Sindicatum funds and operates clean energy products around the world and the joint venture with AnaeCo will target government, waste management companies and infrastructure developers in four key geographical regions, India, China, South-East Asia and North Asia.

“The story has momentum, it is meeting a market that has a need but the problem in this market is that for a long time there have been a lot of failures,” Mr Kedemos said.

“This is why councils are naturally conservative but when they see a story that is for once very different then that is an interesting one.”