Comprehensive Reports from the ISWA Task Force : IN DEPTH: ISWA’s Circular Economy Six Pack of Reports

With the Circular Economy Package sitting at the top of the European waste agenda, and COP21 commitments fresh off the drawing board, the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA) has published a series of six high level reports detailing the challenges and opportunities presented by a shift away from a linear economy.

Introducing the reports and some of their respective authors, Antonis Mavropoulos, CEO of D-WASTE and Chair of ISWA’s Scientific and Technical Committee, led a recent webinar.

First to step into the breach and present some of the findings from the reports was Björn Appelqvist, department manager at Rambøll and Chair of ISWA’s Working Group on Recycling & Waste Minimisation.

According to the report, the waste industry sits at the centre of a major economic shift and has an opportunity to work with industry and policy makers to shift the balance between primary and secondary raw materials.

“Looking at the OECD as the ISWA Task Force has done, we can see that by 2020 we have the potential to deliver four-fold the amount of energy from waste, we can four-fold the delivery of compost, and we can make substantial improvements in the delivery of raw materials,” explained Appelqvist.

“Today 40% of global raw material demands can be covered by secondary raw materials recycled by the waste management sector. But if you look at where we are at best today, which would for example be paper – 60% of the raw material need comes from recycled paper,” he continued. “That can be compared to plastics where we are struggling on a 5% contribution, which indicates there is room for improvement.”

Appelqvist also highlighted the introduction of new models for reuse and waste minimisation, as well as more and more refined methods for extracting scarce materials, as areas in which the waste industry can play an increasingly important role in material flows.

However, he added that it’s important to remember that technically it is impossible to completely close the loops.

“There will be leaks and there will be products loosing their quality over time,” he said. “That’s why it’s important for us as a sector to adopt cascading models, meaning that we work our products through cascades from high quality to low quality usage. At the end of the cascade everything that can be recovered for energy will be recovered for energy.”

“The things that can’t be recovered for energy and can’t be used for production, we have to find final sinks for to get them out of the loops,” he concluded. “That’s the call of the sector. The contribution we can make is large.”

Mavropoulos summarised that there is good news and bad.

"The good news is that working the cascade, by so many years of recycling in the waste management industry, there is a lot of hope to close the loop for many materials,” he noted. “The bad news is that for some materials we feel that it won’t be possible to close the cycle.”

Martin Brocklehurst, Independent environmental Consultant at KempleyGreen Consultants and lead author of the Trends and Emerging Ideas report came next.

“The issue for me is that if you look at the long term trends, within the OECD economies in particular, there is a clear message that the linear economy is in a phase of decline,” he said. “It’s a dead end, leading to gross wasted resources and some of the most toxic waste and unsightly waste dumps the world has ever seen.”

According to Brocklehurst the current situation is also leading to escalating plastic volumes in the global oceans – most of which comes from land, not as people once thought from shipping.

“If you’re a global CEO you know that the risks are too great to stay with the linear economy,” he asserted. “It’s only a matter of time before resources tighten and the cost on the company accounts for raw materials rise to well over 40% of company costs. So although at the moment we have commodity price falls, this is but a blip in the economic drivers as we see populations rise and demand increase.”

“When you look at global trends,” continued Brocklehurst. “It’s increasingly clear that the circular economy is part of the start of the third industrial revolution, based on cheap, freely available raw materials that we are increasingly concentrating in our urban areas.”

He also noted that there is a growing trend for most of the population to live in urban areas.

“That gives the waste industry control of something like 4 billion metric tonnes of stuff, which we currently call waste, in the OECD countries – and if you go globally, something like 12 billion tonnes,” Brocklehurst continued. “The question is, whether the pace of change is accelerating enough to supply the resource gap.”

According to Brocklehurst, it’s clear when you look globally that there’s a race amongst OECD countries to secure the productivity gains, jobs and growth that come with finding new innovative ways to use those materials. The early leaders in the field will be the ones that generate the greatest economic opportunity.

“The economic prize is a real one, and it beholds us all to recognise that if want to achieve that there is very real change needed in the way we go about managing the flows of raw materials,” he urged.

Brocklehurst added that one of the most important changes identified by the Task Force was the need to move away from prescriptive waste regulations.

Another of the six reports produced by ISWA’s Task Force, Circular Economy: Carbon, Nutrients and Soil, described the potential value that can be recovered from organic wastes.

It focussed specifically on the carbon and plant nutrient content in organic wastes and how they can be recycled to create high value products, contribute towards feeding an ever-growing global population, as well as help conserve resources and improve soils. While the report focused on OECD countries, the principles outlined are global.

Jane Gilbert, an independent environmental services professional and author of the report, explained that the focus was to look at organics in its wider sense, including garden waste, crop residues, waste from food production and manure. The report also examined the issue of soil degradation and erosion.

“Looking at things from a completely different perspective outside of waste, we know that our soils are undergoing rapid deterioration,” she said. “Somewhere in the region of 10 million hectares of crop land every year is lost through erosion. About 80% of the world’s crop land is suffering moderate to severe erosion.”

“We know that by recycling, in particular through composting and anaerobic digestion, we can actually put back a lot of the carbon and nutrients. In terms of carbon, there is one to two million tonnes more of stable carbon from the municipal stream alone that could be put onto soils,” continued Gilbert.

However, she added that there are also lots of nutrients in this stream, including around 1.4 million tonnes of nitrogen that is currently being lost.

“When we consider that the manufacture of this nitrogen through conventional processes is releasing in the region of 1% of total greenhouse gas emissions, just by recycling these nutrients not only are we helping to improve the fertility of the soils, but we’re significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” concluded Gilbert. “It’s a win win situation. It’s all about joining up the linkages.

The Full Six Pack

For more from the authors of ISWA’s comprehensive line up of reports don’t miss the May/June issue of Waste Management World. All six can be downloaded below:

· REPORT 1 - CIRCULAR ECONOMY: TRENDS AND EMERGING IDEAS

· REPORT 2 - CIRCULAR ECONOMY: CYCLES LOOPS AND CASCADES

· REPORT 3 - CIRCULAR ECONOMY: CLOSING THE LOOPS

· REPORT 4 - CIRCULAR ECONOMY:CARBON, NUTRIENTS AND SOIL

· REPORT 5 - CIRCULAR ECONOMY: ENERGY AND FUELS

· REPORT 6 - CIRCULAR ECONOMY: RESOURCES AND OPPORTUNITIES

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