Where the City Burns: A Visit to Amsterdam’s Waste-to-Energy Machine

Cycling to AEB. Image by Emma Griffith.

Arriving at the gates of the waste incinerator, we park our bikes next to a freight train that has just delivered the weekly load of waste from the city of Rome. According to AEB’s vision, waste treatment is part of an international circular economy. If waste cannot be prevented, it is better processed in a highly regulated plant than left to pollute soil and sky in landfills elsewhere. In that sense, importing waste is framed not as excess, but as responsibility. Besides, Amsterdam’s waste would simply not be enough to keep the incinerator burning 24/7.

The numbers are staggering. Each year, AEB processes around 1.4 million tonnes of waste. The material is separated, burned, and filtered. From this stream, approximately 175,000 tonnes of reusable materials (grondstoffen) are recovered. The plant generates electricity for roughly 320,000 households and heat for around 41,000 households. Starting in 2028, 480,000 tonnes of CO₂ will be captured and stored. Yet somewhat (un-)surprisingly, only 12% of all incoming waste is separated and sent to recycling plants. We learn that this is considered a relatively high percentage in contemporary waste management: a sobering reminder of how much still ends up in the furnace. Another surprising fact is the current struggle with discarded laughing gas (nitrous oxide) containers thrown into residual waste, which have caused explosions inside the incinerators, severely damaging installations and endangering workers. What appears as ephemeral consumption on the street becomes a violent interruption in the city’s hidden heat infrastructure.

The AEB feeds back the residual heat from waste incineration into the city through a large network of pipelines. Yet, this waste-to-energy circular policy is inherently contradictory (Savini and Giezen, 2020). First and foremost because it deepens our collective need and reliance on an ever-increasing influx of wasted material. Second, because waste processing, and thereby heat production, runs steadily throughout the year, but the demand for heat peaks sharply in winter and drops close to zero in summer. This seasonal imbalance poses technical and economic challenges. While one solution could be selling the heat to nearby companies demanding a steady inflow of heat year-round, this only proves to be a partial solution. Adding those companies to heat consumers would only increase the overall heat demand during peak seasons in winter while at the same time replacing household consumers with commercial consumers would go against the political green energy transition focused on moving households away from fossil fuel dependency. Third, because the waste-to-energy flows are deeply politicized through its history of privatization and the public-private-partnership between the Swedish energy provider Vattenfall and the municipality of Amsterdam.

With the privatization and financialization waves starting in the 1980s, the AEB plant was reorganized into AEB NV, a limited liability company in which the municipality was the largest shareholder (Rekenkamer, 2018). This arrangement showed its limits when in 2019 the AEB was forced to close four of its six incinerator ovens due to neglected maintenance. This was mainly due to a misalignment between decision-making and management: the municipality as the main owner was making the decisions even when they lacked oversight. To avoid the massive investment to maintain the facility, the municipality prepared the sale of its shares. After many years and failed attempts of trying to find a buyer, the city decided not to proceed with the sale in 2025, when it became clear that this critical infrastructure would likely fall into the hands of a Chinese investor (Wagemakers & van Zoelen, 2025). Instead, the municipality chose to continue investing public money in the plant for the next 10 years while shifting the management fully to the AEB CEOs. This episode illustrates how urban heat metabolism is not only technical, but deeply political: ownership structures directly shape the capacity for democratic control and regulatory oversight.

In a recent paper, Savini (2026) deepens the analysis of the urban heat metabolism of Amsterdam by looking at the politics of source, profit, and scale. He argues that in the heat transition in Amsterdam, a shift from top-down waste-to-energy infrastructures providing high-temperature heat in a centralized manner to a large number of households is increasingly challenged by the emergence of small-scale, low-temperature heat networks, some even operating from collective property with democratic decision-making structures. While debates around the energy transition are often dominated by technical and economic arguments, the materiality of the energy source, the role of profit and property and the question of scale are the actual drivers of the transition.

After the visit, we cycled back towards the center, once again adjusting to the shrinking scale of streets and houses. Our final stop was De Sering, a community-based activist space that cooks affordable meals from otherwise wasted food. Spaces like De Sering contribute to the everyday circularity of the city even when they are not part of mainstream policy documents. Around long tables and over warm plates of delicious food, we watched Artifacts of Accumulation, a documentary by Carolien Schippers and Locument film collective by Romea Muryń and Franscisco Lobo. This short film traces waste flows across six processing and landfill sites. While landfilling is no longer allowed, existing landfills are allowed to vertically grow.

As garbage becomes increasingly invisible in urban life, the documentary makes its material and spatial implications visible again. Moving carefully between granular substances and territorial landscapes, it reflects what our waste systems reveal about contemporary values and contradictions. For us today, the movie also moved our understanding beyond the story of waste processing at the AEB, by showing how waste is integrated in our landscapes through landfills, buried waste fields and the reuse of burned (and slightly toxic) ashes for construction sites.

The filmmakers approached waste not as a technical residue, but as a spatial and political condition. Architect and researcher Carolien Schippers joined us to present her research conducted in collaboration with ARCAM, to speak about her architectural practice, and to share previously unseen footage—discarded scenes that did not make it into the final cut.

Seeing the film after standing inside AEB earlier that day sharpened our understanding of Amsterdam’s heat transition as an urban heat metabolism. The system is territorially embedded yet internationally connected; it is presented as circular, yet depends on steady wasteful material inputs; it is framed as green, yet entangled with questions of ownership and profit. It raised interesting questions about our relation to wasted materials and choices around the energy transition. Who really benefits from our waste?

References

RMA (2018) Grip op Westpoort Warmte: onderzoeksrapport. De Rekenkamer.

Savini, F., & Giezen, M. (2020). Responsibility as a field: The circular economy of water, waste, and energy. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 38(5), 866-884.

Savini, F. (2026). The urban heat metabolism: The politics of source, profit, and scale. Urban Political Ecology, 30497515261423674.

Schippers, C. (2025) Artifacts of Accumulation [Documentary] Locument film collective. More information on ARCAM.

Wagemakers, T. & Van Zoelen, B. (February 12, 2025) Verkoop van afvalenergiebedrijf AEB weer niet gelukt – en dat heeft financiële gevolgen voor Amsterdam. Het Parool.