The Environmental Services Association (ESA) is launching its first biowaste strategy, ‘Circular Organics: Biowaste in a Circular Economy’, at this year’s RWM Show, which opens tomorrow, Tuesday 16 September.

The 20-page strategy purports to address the key challenges faced by the biowaste treatment sector and offer a set of concrete actions to move the sector closer to a circular economy.

Low levels of biowaste recycling throughout Europe

About 40-50 per cent of household bins consist of biowaste, yet a recent report from the European Environment Agency (EEA), ‘Managing municipal solid waste – a review of achievements in 32 European countries’, found that increases in biowaste recycling between 2001 and 2010 were ‘modest’, with only Italy increasing its municipal-derived biowaste recycling by more than 10 percentage points.

The EEA suggested that the reduced level of biowaste recycling can be put down to: ‘the absence of an EU-wide obligation to recycle biowaste’ (as EU rules only limit the amount of biodegradable waste that can be landfilled); the absence of ‘common EU quality standards or end-of-waste criteria for generated compost/digestate’; and the fact that dry recycling and biowaste recycling potential ‘depends on their respective share[s] in total municipal waste’.

ESA report details

According to ‘Circular Organics: Biowaste in a Circular Economy’, actions for unlocking the full benefits of biowaste include:

· adopting a biowaste hierarchy, with avoidance and reuse of food for human consumption at the top;

· better coordination between policy areas;

· implementation of a peat levy;

· setting up a commonly adopted life cycle assessment (LCA) tool; and

· encouraging local authorities to procure waste derived products.

Chairman of ESA’s Biotreatment Working Group Stuart Hayward-Higham said the strategy seeks “to explore the barriers and solutions that exist and to deliver our vision in a practical way”.

ESA’s Director General Barry Dennis added: “This strategy looks across the complete biowaste landscape and highlights the effective solutions to treating and managing this material within a circular economy.

“Biowaste is an important resource and we must continue to extract as much value from it as possible and prevent it being lost in landfill.”

The ESA is launching the strategy at RWM in the Local Authority Theatre on 16 September at 14:30.

Read more about increasing the quality of biowaste collections.