Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Mary Creagh MP, delivering the keynote speech on the second day of the CIWM conference.

Concerns over the waste and energy-from-waste (EfW) investment market were a recurring theme at the second day of the annual Chartered Institution of Wastes Management (CIWM) conference yesterday (12 June).

Opening proceedings, Mary Creagh MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, pointed to a lack of leadership from the current government, saying that “government should provide leadership and certainty for investment, especially when finances are tight”, as it was essential for England to develop the right investment market to ensure high-quality recyclates are processed domestically.

She lambasted the coalition government for its “deregulatory and anti-environment rhetoric” that is “creating uncertainty for businesses and holding back investment”, and for its apparent “retreating” from the promise of becoming a zero-waste economy.

In order to achieve better domestic recycling, Creagh also noted that there was a need for the Packaging Export Recovery Note (PERN) system to be reformed, as it currently “incentivises the export of poor-quality material rather than keeping it in the UK and adding value here, in our own industry”.

She went on to criticise England’s 50 per cent recycling target as being “too low”, adding that it was “wrong” that England should piggy-back off the devolved governments’ higher targets in meeting the EC’s revised Waste Framework Directive target.

In closing, Creagh called on the audience to engage with the Labour Party’s waste policy review to support the development of the domestic reprocessing infrastructure.

“The resources sector should be a key economic driver to create the green jobs and growth that we need”, she added.

Videos of Mary Creagh’s speech, as well as Lord de Mauley’s keynote speech from day one of the conference, will be available to watch online later today (13 June).

Energy from waste

Looking at future possibilities of utilising energy produced from waste, David Wagstaff, Head of Heat Strategy and Policy at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said that many EfW facilities are not running to their full efficiencies, as they are not utilising the heat produced for external use.

Indeed, many operational plants with the potential to produce combined heat and power (CHPs) have not been able to capture the heat produced due to the disruptive nature of laying the required pipework.

Speaking to Resource for issue 53, Ricardo-AEA’s Practice Lead on Waste Management and Resource Efficiency Dr Adam Read explained: “CHP can be really difficult to integrate with existing local energy systems. You can find yourselves having to dig up pavements left, right and centre. So, it’s quite disruptive, it’s quite costly, and given the UK situation, which has always been about cheap landfill, it doesn’t tend to be very good value for money.”

One key factor in ensuring that these sites use any heat produced for consumer or commercial consumption, is the development of heat networks, said Wagstaff.

“Heat from renewable energy [from waste] is coming, but we need networks to deliver that, perhaps to a grid network, like there is for gas and electricity.”

However, Wagstaff went on to say despite government recognising the missed opportunity, it will be up to private investment to do the “heavy lifting”, adding that the Green Investment Bank (GIB) could also be a source of investment in supporting this.

He concluded: “Let’s not stick waste into the ground, lets turn it into renewable energy, and lets reuse that energy for heat as well as electricity.”

Future of biogas

Charlotte Morton, Chief Executive of the Anaerobic Digestion & Biogas Association (ADBA), laid out the case for increased investment in AD, saying that the benefits of the technology were two-fold: “AD recycles phosphates from food [through digestate], so is a recycling technology as well as a renewable energy source.”

She added that biogas produced from AD could also have an increased role in future (for example, for use as a renewable fuel) but said that government did not seem to be taking advantage of the possibilities of biogas: “When government released its Gas Generation Strategy, where was biogas? Nowhere!”

Wagstaff countered that by saying that his DECC collegagues should have called the document the ‘Natural Gas Generation Strategy’ instead.

Overcapacity vs undercapacity

Looking at the stagnation of investment in energy from waste plants, Andy Street from SLR Consulting said that varying figures in available feedstock for EfW facilities were doing nothing to help boost investor confidence.

“What does our capacity future really look like?” Street asked. “Some say there is 7 million tonnes of overcapacity, while others point to a 13 million tonne shortfall.”

Indeed, Adrian Judge, Managing Director for Waste & Bioenergy at the GIB, said that this discrepancy in information, coupled with the fact that there were “too many waste projects in the pipeline”, was undermining investor confidence.

However, the GIB has recently announced it will be potentially investing £50 million into AD infrastructure.

Lack of long-term vision ‘holding us back’

Other speakers at the conference included Julio Garcia-Burgues, Head of Unit C2-Waste Management at the European Commission (who updated the conference on EC policy), and Dr Colin Church, Director of Climate, Waste & Atmosphere at Defra, who intimated that his title would be changing on 1 July, to cover additional areas on sustainable development and business.

An audience vote closed the conference, with the majority of attendees concluding that a lack of long-term vision on waste is 'holding us back', and that resource efficiency and waste minimisation should be the areas we look to next, rather than recycling.

Read more about the CIWM Conference 2013.