Last week the Audit Commission suggested that waste incinerators are the only means by which local authorities can avoid rising landfill costs. The Commission also suggested that the Government should back local authorities in overcoming public objections to incinerators and added that those which are currently going through planning have little chance of impacting on the landfill reduction targets set for 2013. However, resource recovery technologies provide a much more environmentally friendly solution – and one which can be achieved quickly.
David Singh is the managing director of Global Renewables
We are building two facilities in Lancashire which will process the household waste of 1.4m people in the county without recourse to any type of thermal treatment, and planning permission was achieved in around four months for each. Added to this, they only take about 18 months to build, as opposed to about three years for the average incinerator.
Recovery
The two facilities are modelled on Global Renewables' reference facility at Eastern Creek in Sydney which uses the company's UR-3R Process® (Urban Resource – Reduce, Recover, Recycle). This system of waste processing combines high levels of recyclable recovery from the household waste stream with anaerobic digestion to capture the harmful greenhouse gas methane and transform it into electricity. The organic fraction of the waste stream is then either composted to create organic growth media (OGM) for use in tree planting or land remediation or solid recovered fuel (SRF).
As a society, we must move away from the old ‘burn and bury' mentality. As technology has improved, so too has the ability to recover resources from the waste stream. Using aerobic and/or anaerobic digestion in tandem with sophisticated sorting processes means waste streams can be seen as a resource rather than a problem for disposal. Waste processors must be incentivised to further extract recyclables and reduce both the greenhouse gas impact of the remaining organics (initially by anaerobic digestion to capture the methane) and then minimise the amount of material going to landfill by either producing compost-like products for soil enhancement or Serfs for energy production.
It's a common misconception that EfW facilities are a great way to solve the problem of waste and rising energy costs. In fact, around 75 per cent of the energy generated by most of these facilities is simply wasted and there is little scope for them to adapt should currently unrecyclable materials, like plastic film, suddenly become recyclable. Waste management companies should be mining the waste stream, not destroying it. The days of a few cans and bottles being picked out of the waste stream are long gone and technology, not an incinerator or a bulldozer, can be used to recover a huge amount of valuable resources from the waste stream.
Subscribe for free