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Waste-to-energy would have more ‘selling power’ if decentralized energy were put into the waste planning equation. While Denmark is somewhere that realized this decades ago, the UK is one of the countries holding back. And it is in danger of losing out, writes Peter Jones For the last 10 years the emphasis in waste management has been embedded within the so-called ‘hierarchy’. Prising UK politicians in Westminster away from the notion that waste comes only from domestic dustbins has been a tortuous process; getting them to realize we need to go beyond the low-hanging fruit of recycling into an holistic interaction between logistics and energy promises to be even more exacting. The crystallization of the debate around carbon and the carbon economy has at least given us a single potential metric on which to benchmark non-financial environmental performance - that of the CO2 footprint. The sooner proposed carbon footprint protocols for different waste transport and processing options are agreed - bringing this sector into the European CO2 trading framework - the better for all. Why? Because most operators in the waste industry recognize that (in the case of household waste at least) reclamation for recycling, material use and composting lead to environmental diseconomies once the 50%-60% level is passed. Put simply - the energy and environmental impact needed to clean up the material exceeds the resultant benefits. Historically, a majority of the industry in the UK has avoided entering the fray on waste-to-energy (WTE) - to the point where incineration and WTE became synonymous. Insiders are well aware that WTE offers a wealth of technological options - many capable of operating at small scale (50,000 tonnes/year) and many offering low-temperature/low-emission options superior to some recycling schemes (in terms of CO2 emissions). This reticence from the UK industry to engage originates from the pedestrian rate of increases in landfill tax and the need for a number of new technology options to win their spurs on the basis of thousands of hours of operating experience in mainland Europe. Those limitations are now falling away to the point where such technologies, with gate fee requirements of around £50-60 (€75-90) per tonne, are becoming eminently bankable as landfill taxes promise to hit £35 (€50) by 2010. This push from within the sector is coupled to ‘demand pull’ factors from the electrical and heat market itself, summarized as: capacity problems, as antiquated, CO2-intensive coal generation and nuclear capacity is closed over the next 15 years regional grid pressures on gas and wire distribution networks in response to population movements and rising energy intensity in the domestic sector political uncertainties surrounding non-European sources of supply. End-users in the industrial and commercial sector face a widening of the European Trading Frameworks and are thus keen to commit themselves to a higher proportion of electrical supply from renewables. This applies (potentially) to the waste sector as well as to the food supply chain, local government, hospitals, hotels and pub chains. These trends encourage an emergent marriage between the waste industry and energy providers throughout the UK - not for very large single-site conventional incineration capacity but for distributed energy systems using combined heat and power (CHP) to deliver electricity and heating capacity at levels of 70%+ thermal efficiency on a scale of 5-20 MW. Such initiatives are especially bankable where they can be co-located with large individual users on enough land to accommodate additional technologies such as composting, recycling storage, mechanical conditioning and preparation. The capacity to flex between sending carbon to soils, energy or avoided energy on a daily basis has to make good economic sense. How much could waste contribute to the national energy supply framework? Past estimates suggest the equivalent of 40 million tonnes of coal in the UK alone. This may be somewhat high unless one includes an allowance for imported agricultural feedstocks. (There will be a lot of biofuel straw floating about in coming years). UK landfills currently accept an estimated 30-50 million tonnes of biogenic and fossil carbon each year. As much as one third of this is viable for recycling but the balance is increasingly viable to collect separately and ‘condition’ through fuel floc preparation plants. At present this material generates 0.7 GW as landfill gas but one can double that yield (given that landfill gas recovery averaged 50% or less), double it again on the basis that fossil carbon as plastic can be utilized (it doesn’t break down in landfills), and double it yet again in terms of displacement impacts if CHP becomes compulsory for WTE to qualify as a renewable fuel. In short, this amounts to something between 4 GW and 6 GW of on-line capacity - around 60%-70% of the country’s historic nuclear load. Will we see any references to these options in the UK Government’s forthcoming waste strategy, one wonders? Ironically, after the last strategy in 2000 the UK could have adopted the Danish model had waste disposal authorities pursued public finance initiatives (PFIs) with vigour and developed co-ownership of such facilities with the private sector, sharing the gate fee benefits. This was because the Danes saw - three decades ago - that waste is waste regardless of origin, and municipal bodies took it upon themselves to provide the necessary exit technologies as part of their urban planning, environmental awareness and energy strategies on a ‘one stop shop’ basis. Moreover, local and central government worked together to ensure that the resultant economic package became a way of keeping the cost of governance down via control of the tendering process. In the UK this has proved ‘mission impossible’ because the first is backward-focused, the second has only just hit the agenda and the third is divorced from environment via another department. As for economic benefits, the public sector is in danger of missing the boat as rising landfill taxes make self-contained private sector investment in new technologies bankable on a standalone basis. This will render PFI increasingly redundant as privately financed waste resource recovery parks repeat the process created by landfill as the cheapest ‘kid on the block’ in the early eighties. Click here to enlarge image Peter T. Jones is Director of External Relations, Biffa, UK.e-mail: peter.jones@biffa.co.uk