Rubbish or Resource?

With climate change and green issues now firmly at the top of the political and news agendas, the focus has sharpened, particularly in the run up to the local elections, on the issue of domestic waste.

The UK, we are constantly told, is running out of landfill sites. Even if this were not the case the hefty fines imposed by the EU Landfill Directive have forced the debate to move on and look at the limited number of alternatives.

The clear favourite, currently, is recycling. It is politically acceptable to voters and the arguments in favour of it appear compelling. In short, recycling programmes appear to reduce the amount of ‘virgin’ resources consumed whilst decreasing the sheer amount of rubbish being sent to landfill.

However, this may be a simplistic argument because, maybe surprisingly given the furore surrounding the issue, recycling is far from the ‘carbon neutral’ ideal it is frequently portrayed to be.

Considerable amounts of energy are consumed in the collection and preparation of the product for re-use, automatically bringing in to question the viability of the practice. Yet there seems a collective national denial and a reluctance to fully explore the issue as we are all led to believe that recycling is saving the planet. But it may not be so green and it may not be the most economically viable option.

The city of New York, an early municipal pioneer, found its much-lauded recycling programme was losing money, so it eliminated glass and plastic recycling. According to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the benefits of recycling glass and plastics were outweighed by the price - recycling was costing twice as much as disposal.

Meanwhile, low demand for the recycled materials meant that much of it was ending up in landfill anyway, despite the best of intentions.

Despite these concerns the attitude remains that local authorities should continue to plough on with trying to recycle as much as possible, as Chris Murphy, deputy chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Wastes Management, explained: “As a generalisation we should be adopting the waste hierarchy. This starts with re-use then recycling wherever we can.

“However, if you’re talking about moving materials with a zero value over large distances that would mean consuming more fuel than the products are worth, that’s when you’ve got to look at a life cycle analysis.”

This approach was reinforced by Kit Strange, director of the Resource Recovery Forum, who said: “The approach should be to look at minimising waste and then look to convert the energy from residual waste.”

To which Murphy added: “Once you’ve taken back as much as you can, we believe that some sort of energy capture process is appropriate - but this shouldn’t be your primary waste treatment.”

Both these experts seem clear that there is an agreed way to progress and, whist alluding to the potential of recouping some of the energy from waste, neither see it as a truly viable solution, it is just a bit better than dumping waste in landfill.

The waste hierarchy, which is widely accepted as presenting the best way to deal with refuse, has a pyramid structure with reuse at the top and landfill at the bottom. In the middle is energy from waste - but this may have been too easily overlooked because of its association with incineration, and needs to be fully included in the debate.

What if our waste was collected and used as fuel? Could this displace the need for a considerable amount of the fossil fuels currently being consumed? Would this, in fact, be a form of recycling? Dr Andrew Ellis of Slough Heat and Power Ltd, a company that provides heating through the use of renewable fuels explained: “With waste there is a resource there that is potentially huge. Both domestic and industrial commercial waste could be put to much better use. I think it should be treated as a resource. That’s the correct word to use.

“And it doesn’t just have to be energy from waste. It can be used as a fuel in all sorts of applications, from large power stations through to cement kilns.”

This idea has been supported by international research including a study by a Swedish study group consisting of Valfrid Paulsson, a former director-general of the Swedish Government’s environmental protection agency, Soren Norrby, the former campaign manager for Keep Sweden Tidy, and the former managing directors of three waste collection companies who reported that the use of incineration to burn household waste - including packaging and food - “is best for the environment, the economy and the management of natural resources.”

Add to this the fact that modern incinerators, gasifiers and fuel making plants can hold all their own waste gasses and particles for disposal elsewhere, and the practice starts to look less of a threat.

“The science exists to extract these gasses,” says Dr Ellis, “it is just a question of whether the economics exist.”

So it seems that we need to rebrand our waste. Stop treating it as rubbish and start seeing it as a resource that can fuel industry and warm our homes, replacing some of the fossil fuel resources currently used to fulfil this need and using modern scientific techniques to tackle the greenhouses gas byproducts.

“There is a debate that needs to happen surrounding what we count as being carbon neutral and what’s not. This needs to be resolved,” says Dr Ellis. “With things like plastics, is burning them a form of recycling because it uses oils that have already been used once? It all depends on where you’re coming at it from.”

And whilst local authorities procrastinate about the best way to move forward and plough on with recycling at all costs, the private sector could be about to solve some of the political problems associated with municipal incinerators and, therefore, the growing amounts of domestic waste by building their own.

Privately owned parks, generating methane from food and garden waste and electricity from a combination of methane and burnable rubbish, are likely to become a common feature of industrial and housing estates within a decade, feeding steam in to neighbouring heating systems and electricity into the grid.

These plants will also create a market for domestic waste. And mechanical sorting - already on the market will rescue more waste for composting and recycling.

One big chemical company, INEOS ChlorVinyls, has already announced a plan for a combined heat and power
(CHP) plant powered by processed waste at Runcorn to be completed by 2010, and is widely expected to be the one of many.

The great waste debate should deal with the facts alone and if, as Dr Ellis has suggested, we are not properly assessing the impacts of recycling whilst at the same time overlooking a useful and plentiful resource which can comfortably replace a large amount of the carbon producing fossil fuels that would be burned anyway, we are not properly addressing the solution to the landfill problem.