The Department for Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has today (27 February) published its Energy from Waste guide.

The stated aim of the handbook is to ‘provide a starting point for discussions about the role energy waste might have in managing waste’. A statement on the department website said that it hoped the guide would ensure households, businesses and the public sector value energy from waste (EfW) ‘in the same way as reuse and recycling’.

However, it also outlines the potential drawbacks of such technology, stating that its viability in the future will depend upon the proportion of waste available for energy recovery (thought to decrease as recycling and reduction rates increase) and the potential costs of using EfW methods.

According to the guide: ‘In future we are aiming to prevent, reuse and recycle more of our waste, so the amount of residual waste [sent to EfW plants] should go down.’

‘Waste hierarchy’

The guide contains various chapters on different aspects of EfW technology, ranging from outlining the purposes and functions of EfW facilities to discussing how an EfW strategy might be implemented.

Defra argues in the handbook that EfW is an important alternative to landfilling waste because it lies higher up the waste hierarchy; the higher up the hierarchy, the more preferable the option is. EfW falls into the ‘recovery’ section of the hierarchy, whilst landfill is classed as ‘disposal’. Prevention, reuse and recycling are all above recovery in the hierarchy.

However, it also acknowledges that ‘all municipal waste incinerators were and are deemed as disposal activities’ and that ‘a municipal waste combustion plant can only be considered to be a recovery operation under R1 if it generates energy and the plant meets the efficiency thresholds calculated using the R1 formula.’

R1 refers to a plant whose incineration operations are principally used to generate energy, whilst the formula calculates the energy efficiency of the municipal solid waste incinerator and expresses it as a factor (based on the total energy produced by the plant as a proportion of the energy of the fuel which is incinerated in the plant).

The guide goes on to acknowledge concerns made by groups such as waste management consultancy Eunomia, which has warned that incinerators could soon be burning recyclable materials in order to keep the facilities running efficiently.

The guide reads: ‘The potential for energy from waste to consume materials which could otherwise be managed higher up in the waste hierarchy is a legitimate concern. This applies to prevention and reuse but is most commonly identified in relation to recycling.’

Indeed, the guide encourages food waste to be anaerobically digested rather than incinerated, as food waste is ‘not particularly suitable for energy from waste’.

‘Anaerobic Digestion is the best available means of dealing with separately collected food waste producing renewable energy and a valuable fertiliser’, it reads.

Adapting to long term change

However, the guide seeks to allay concerns over incineration by citing the example of Europe, which ‘show that high rates of recycling, composting and energy from waste can and do coexist’.

‘[UK] Government’s aim is to get the most energy out of residual waste, rather than to get the most waste into energy recovery. This reflects the desire to move waste up the waste hierarchy and the drive to prevent, reuse and recycle in the first instance,’ the guide continues

‘Waste infrastructure has a long lifetime and care needs to be taken at the start to ensure systems can adapt to potential long term change and drive waste up the hierarchy, not constrain it. Flexibility of the overall approach to future change should therefore be another key consideration in any proposal.’

At the publication of the guide, a Defra spokesperson said: “In tough economic times, dealing with waste and recycling properly not only makes environment sense – it makes good business sense too. But when waste can’t be reused or recycled, the government’s aim is to get the most value from it by turning it in to energy, to power homes and businesses. This new guide can be used to help raise awareness about the EfW options currently available, and to inform the debate surrounding the environmental, technical and economic issues involved.”

Opposition

However, the guide makes clear that local authorities have the final say in whether to include incineration in their waste strategies. Indeed, Stroud District Council has recently (21 February) passed a motion to withhold its waste from being sent to the nearby Javelin Park incineration plant over concerns that doing so would waste taxpayers money and be harmful to the environment.

EfW remains a contentious issue, with opponents claiming facilities often greatly overestimate the amount of material available to be incinerated, leading to overcapacity. Indeed, GAIA (the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives), has warned that the EU’s increasing incineration capacity could damage recycling rates, while Eunomia released a report in 2012 that warned that without any change in residual waste quantities, by 2015/16, there would be treatment ‘overcapacity of 6.9 million tonnes per annum’.

The publication of the guide comes less than a week after Defra withdrew £217.1 million in PFI funding from three proposed EfW plants, after finding that the 29 residual waste treatment projects that already have funding are ‘sufficient’ to meet the EU’s 2020 landfill diversion targets.

Read more about energy from waste.