ENERGY FROM WASTE AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES


Malcolm Chilton, Managing Director of Covanta Energy, considers the UK’s approach to Energy from Waste and its role in terms of the development of sustainable communities and economic restructuring.


For a long time in the UK, Energy from Waste (EfW) has been seen primarily as one of the options available to us to divert residual waste from landfill. Of course it is that, and in many ways perhaps the most efficient and effective way of contributing to making our waste management practices more sustainable.


This is a rather different perspective to the one that is common across much of continental Europe where EfW is much more fully integrated into the concept of sustainable communities. In such societies, EfW is not seen simply as an effective response to the need to manage communities’ residual wastes. It is seen as an integral part of the community infrastructure, contributing sustainable power and heat and having an important part to play in the economic life of communities.


Geography and geology A significant part of this difference in perception is down to geography and geology: • Geography matters because the markedly different climatic conditions across, for example, northern Europe mean that the seasonal variation in demand for hot water and heating is much less than in the UK. This means that the economics of district heating – with the attendant high infrastructure costs – made it sensible to integrate district heating networks into early urban planning from the late 19th century onwards


• Geology matters because, while the UK has many locations where the ground conditions are ideally suited to landfill, much of continental Europe does not, meaning that alternatives had to be pursued vigorously from a much earlier stage.


This means that EfW and district heating have been integrated in the development of sustainable communities in much of Europe for well over a hundred years. For example, the first combined heat and power EfW facility in Denmark was built at Frederiksberg in 1903.


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It was the first of many, with often large-scale facilities being built at the heart of communities across Europe to this day. One consequence is that in many of these societies there is broad acceptance of the role of EfW in promoting sustainable communities.


In the UK, largely because the geographic and geological conditions are so different, the debate over the potential of EfW has evolved in a very different way. Here, we have argued intensely about the part that EfW should play in sustainable waste management but have only much more recently begun to think about how it can play a wider role in making our communities more sustainable. As the pressure has mounted to ensure that we develop a more robust and secure energy supply network, while simultaneously reducing the carbon emissions from energy production, so interest in the part that EfW can play has grown. This is welcome. But it is vital that we frame the debate about how we grow the role of EfW in the right terms. Yes, it is about how we use EfW to secure value from residual wastes. And, yes, it is about how we optimise the deployment of the energy content of that waste.


Developing UK CHP


So it is not surprising that a key focus of much government policy work in recent years has been on how we can move to a situation in which UK EfW plants are developed and operate routinely in combined heat and power (CHP) mode.


Concrete steps have been taken in the last few years to encourage the deployment of new EfW projects in CHP mode. These include: • Increasing the payments for CHP EfW projects under


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