Are We Entering A New Era of Recycling?

Kristian Dales, sales and marketing director at FCC Environment, addresses a comment from Helmut Maurer of the European Commission that energy recovery should be a last resort in preference to recycling plastics. It’s all very well and good arguing for plastics recycling over energy recovery but is there a commercially viable market for recycled plastics? Where is the certainty given the downturn in the global commodities market and the recent spiralling of oil prices, the impacts of which are already impacting on demand for recovered plastic polymers? Quality will continue to be a crucial price differentiator, but this is heavily reliant on influencing consumer behaviour to address issues of contamination. There is no sign yet of the scale of funding we saw back in the early 2000s to orchestrate new public education campaigns to tackle this. There is also a shortfall of reprocessing capacity in the UK to deal with greater volumes of recovered materials. In addition, national recycling rates appear to have plateaued – with no firm policy framework in place to help stimulate the secondary commodities market, developing a robust business case to invest in new materials recovery facilities remains challenging. Given the current state of play, are we entering an era of diminishing returns with regards to recycling? The thermal treatment of residual plastics through waste to energy (WtE) can act as a complementary technology choice. We currently have a buoyant UK export market for refuse derived fuels (RDF), driven by demand for feedstock from overseas WtE facilities, low shipping costs and the strength of sterling. RDF exports offer the industry a cost-effective treatment/disposal route for residual waste while helping to deliver against zero waste to landfill aspirations. But in exporting our RDF, we are also exporting huge value out of the UK as well as the fact that exporting RDF while importing energy in other forms also undermines domestic energy security. RDF has the potential to offer so much more if a domestic market can be built for it, both in terms of meeting the UK’s future energy requirements and offering businesses a closed loop solution to help power their logistics and production processes. Despite the current lack of spare capacity in domestic WtE facilities to take advantage of the amount of RDF being produced, there are enough WtE facilities either under construction or in the planning process across the UK to match future RDF capacity to demand. But it remains unclear as to how many of these plants will eventually become operational. It is difficult to gauge investor confidence with regard to large-scale WtE projects, especially in the wake of the Government’s decision to withdraw funding for a series of major PFI municipal waste contracts. This, coupled with the seemingly confusing mix of incentives and credits under the Feed-in Tariff, Renewables Obligation Certificates and Contracts for Difference regimes, has resulted in an inconsistent policy approach that is only creating more uncertainty for the sector. That said, WtE remains a proven and bankable technology. Recently we have seen a handful of new merchant facilities come on-stream in the UK and over the next five years we will inevitably see more, especially as EU 2020 landfill and renewable energy targets draw closer. Read More Remondis UK Boss Calls On Waste Industry to Pull Togther With an election on the horizon in the UK, it has never been more important for the waste industry to work together or risk falling risk behind the rest of Europe, explains Marcus Bauer, managing director of Remondis UK... Are Current EU C&D Waste Recycling Targets an Obstacle to Growth? Peter Craven, Head of Marketing at CDE Global argues that rather than demonstrating success these targets are masking wider problems in the CD&E waste recycling sector across Europe… R1 Climate Correction Factor for Waste to Energy Plants Finally Agreed Hubert de Chefdebien and Guillaume Perron-Piché of the European Suppliers of Waste to Energy Technology discuss the latest developments to the R1 Formula enacted by the Commission and Member States on 17 November 2014…