A report released today (3 September) by the RDF Export Industry Group has claimed that there would be virtually no environmental benefit to domestically processing the refuse-derived fuel (RDF) currently being exported from the UK.

Since 2010, the amount of UK waste being exported to mainland Europe as RDF has risen rapidly. While in 2010, RDF exports totalled 0.1 million tonnes, by 2014 that figure had risen to 2.6 million tonnes.

This sharp increase led to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) issuing a call for evidence on the RDF market, in particular seeking assurance that the waste hierarchy is followed in the production, use and export of RDF, and that only ‘truly residual waste’ is exported.

This prompted the formation of the RDF Export Industry Group, which includes waste management companies from both the UK and mainland Europe, who commissioned this report in response.

The report, ‘Analysis of the Legal, Economic and Environmental Rationales’, prepared by consultancy Eunomia, seeks to present the opportunities and issues surrounding RDF export, including consideration of the legal, environmental and economic cases for and against the practice.

Report findings

According to the report, current levels of RDF export is ‘unlikely to result in any net increase in CO2 emissions from residual waste treatment’, though the level of emissions depends on the infrastructure used in the process. ‘Even when the shipping distance is increased by 1,700 miles’, it reads, ‘total emissions for the export scenarios only rise by 1 per cent.’

Additionally, the report concludes, if the 2.6 million tonnes of RDF that was exported in 2014 was treated domestically, it would contribute around 0.5 per cent to total UK electricity generation and around 0.8 per cent to total UK renewable electricity generation.

The report does note that the process has financial costs to the UK market, though. Gate fee revenue, ‘mainly for landfill operators at this point’, suffers due to exportation, at the cost of some jobs, and landfill tax receipts also fall.

However, the report says that exportation offers alternative employment in the form of waste collection and transfer, and offsets lost gate fees by generating revenue for other operators along the RDF production and supply chain.

Also highlighted in the report is the lack of any treatment ‘standard’ for exported RDF under existing legislation. This, it says, would be ‘challenging and costly’ to enforce, both to government and the industry, under current terms.

On the issue of possible introduction of a legal treatment standard for RDF, the report reads: ‘A more cost-effective and environmentally preferable approach to enforcing the [waste] hierarchy would be for Defra and the EA [Environment Agency] to focus on regulating and incentivising the greater capture of recyclable materials at source.

‘Defra and the EA should therefore consider how this might be achieved through better enforcement of the regulations.’

Landfill tax making export of waste more affordable

Mike Brown, Managing Director of Eunomia, author of the report and Secretariat to the RDF Export Industry Group, said: “This evidence-based report should help to progress the debate on RDF exports away from some of the misconceptions about it being key to waste being abandoned in the UK, or that this is where we should focus, rather than at source, in order to move waste up the hierarchy, or even that it causes the loss of a significant amount of fuel that otherwise would be available domestically.

“What’s really at stake here is that there has been a modest but sizeable shift in the UK waste sector as a result of the landfill tax escalator making export affordable.”

Read Defra’s call to evidence regarding RDF or the RDF Export Industry Group’s ‘Analysis of the Legal, Economic and Environmental Rationales’.