The European Commission’s Joint Research Committee (JRC) yesterday (November 28) put on hold its proposals to subject ‘compost and digestate from anaerobic digestion’ to testing, as part of its ‘End-of-Waste proposals’.
This follows ‘pan-European industrial lobbying’ by companies including the Renewable Energy Association (REA) and the Association for Organics Recycling (AfOR), who argue that the proposals would have ‘undermined the confidence the industry had built up in the organics recycling and food retail sectors’ under the UK's PAS 100 standard and the REA’s Biofertiliser Certification Scheme (BCS).
The testing was intended to ascertain whether or not digestate is of high enough quality to no longer be considered waste. Currently, the BCS is responsible for providing the UK with digestate quality assurance, which if free of organic pollutants can be used as an organic fertiliser.
Commenting on the postponed proposals, Head of Biogas at REA, David Collins, said: “The REA and REAL have worked for a long time with AfOR and WRAP to build confidence in UK digestate with the Biofertiliser Certification Scheme. This targeted scheme enables biogas businesses to simply and cost-effectively assure the quality of their digestate.
“The development of a market for quality certified digestate and maximising its cash value as a biofertiliser is a vital part of the commercial equation. The End of Waste proposals however would subject all wastes intended for recycling – from biogas digestate to the products of mechanical biological treatment (MBT) and even sewage – to the same extensive set of costly and largely unnecessary lab tests.”
The REA also argues that the JRC proposals would have ‘imposed unnecessary and in many cases unaffordable administrative and regulatory burdens on UK producers of compost and digestate’.
According to the REA, these ‘burdens’ would have included unnecessary laboratory tests designed to detect a ‘range of pollutants from mixed wastes which simply do not occur in compost or digestate from source-separated inputs’.
“We have lobbied hard on this issue, engaging with stakeholders both within the UK and across the EU. Introducing the proposals in their present form would have placed an unnecessary, and in many cases unaffordable, burden on the UK AD industry”, Collins added.
An additional workshop is now scheduled to take place on 26 February 2013, at the headquarters of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies in Seville, at which the JRC intends to discuss new evidence.
Among the main issues to be discussed at the workshop are product quality criteria, input material criteria and description of impacts for composting and digestion.
Read more about the End of Waste criteria for organics
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