SUSTAINABILITY
Waste not want not
Considering the huge amount of waste which Britain produces, could it not be all put to better use, asks Richard Mackillican
T
he amount of waste produced by local authorities every year
is believed to be of the order of 25 million tonnes. With landfill taxes set to increase, this would mean that the government would, in effect, become the country’s largest waste company as it collects around £2 billion in landfill taxes, which is more the any waste company, with its closest rival collecting around £1.6 billion (including tax).
Nationally, this averages out at around half a million tonnes of waste per county, costing each county on average around £50 million every year. Given that significant reductions need to be made in local government spending, better waste management would be a good start.
Peter Jones, a waste management expert and ambassador on the subject for the World Wide Fund for Nature, believes the best way to go about it would be to see the issue in three parts.
“First, there are issues around waste production, then issues
Peter Jones
around the kind of technology which will be used - because landfill is being priced out of the market - and then, finally, at the other end of the process, the forthcoming obligations under the Carbon Reduction Commitment.
“Dealing with the issue of waste production first, we now know that the vast majority of waste going into people’s bins is carbon based and historically we have only had two underpinning strategies around waste- composting and recycling.
This means that instead of putting the carbon based waste into the ground for the fossil record as landfill, we compost the carbon which converts it into useful soils which can be spread across the land.
“The second option involves recovering some of that material and using it for recycling, which is another area where society has
Nov/Dec 10
become reasonably advanced due to the emergence of tradable permits, in the form of the Landfill Allowance Trading Scheme, along with other pressures such as government targets for landfill diversion.
“There seems to have been a general political reluctance to accept that there is a third way of dealing with this waste which is energy conversion. I believe that this reluctance is due to the connection which energy conversion has to incineration and the public perception that energy equates only to incineration.
“Despite this, what we need to think about is the carbon which we throw away, seeking to change behaviour to minimise waste, but we do need to accept that there will always be waste. This being the case we then need to begin thinking about how we can treat that waste in order to enable ourselves to use the
carbon based waste to replace a certain amount of fossil fuels. This energy conversion can be in the form of gas even though for the last 20 years we have restricted ourselves to thermal destruction and electricity alone.
“This means that whilst local authorities can always compost and recycle, there will always be a residue which needs to be dealt with. So why not make effective use of it to at once reduce your organisation’s carbon footprint and to produce energy.
“When you also take into account that landfill gate fee costs, which 10 years ago were only £10 per tonne, will be more like £100 per tonne by 2013, along with the fact that landfills are closing now because they are not being invested in, then local government needs to take a look at what could prove to be a lucrative market from using up scrap carbon waste.”
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